


above and below

by magicmagnus



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bad Puns, Comedy, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, an outrageous amount of flirting, angel! alec, demon! magnus, good omens! au, it's the end of the world as we know it, kind of enemies to friends to lovers... but they're already friends, occasional dark comedy but like. light grey comedy really, some religious irreverence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicmagnus/pseuds/magicmagnus
Summary: It’s the end of the world as we know it. The Four Horsemen are riding, reality is shifting, and someone has lost the Antichrist. After thousands of years living on earth and swaying human souls to their sides, Magnus (a flirtatious demon with a heart of gold) and Alec (a somewhat rude and antisocial angel) have become quite accustomed to life on earth, and neither one of them are too happy about the impending Apocalypse. The two hatch a plan to avert the End of All Things, only to have it rapidly spiral out of control -- something they might be able to handle, if they could just put their personal feelings aside…A Good Omens AU





	above and below

**Author's Note:**

> I am so excited to finally be posting this! This is an AU based on the wonderfully hilarious book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. You don't have to have read the book to understand the fanfic, and if you have read the book and feel I didn't do it justice... you're probably right; it's a hard act to follow. Still, this was a labor of love for both Good Omens as well as for Magnus and Alec, so I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend you do! All credit, of course, for the plot goes to Neil Gaimain and Terry Pratchett, as well as a few of the jokes. But I like to think most of them are mine. 
> 
> Thank you to my sister, [decalexas](https://decalexas.tumblr.com), for being a sounding board, and my first reader. I absolutely could not have done it without her. And thank you also to my wonderful beta, [bookwhipped](http://bookwhipped.tumblr.com) who was wonderful and did a great job of helping me try to whip this into something coherent. And thank you to the [Shadowhunters Beta Network](http://shadowhuntersbetas.tumblr.com), for all the great work they do!
> 
> I hope you enjoy it, please let me know if you do! Most of all, I hope it makes you laugh. And a full round of apologies to... Christians, Satanists, vegans, Forever 21, New York drivers, 432 Park Avenue, soft rock religious cover bands, Catholics, Iowa, conspiracy theorists, Kim Kardashian, late 90s messaging forums, and Mormons. It's all in good fun. 
> 
> As always, you can catch me on tumblr at [magicmagnus](http://magicmagnus.tumblr.com) or aziraphvle.

**In the Beginning**

Alec had spent the last quarter of a century living in the most hideous Manhattan high-rise that Magnus had ever seen in his very, very, _very_ long life. It was a monolithic eyesore jutting into the skyline in defiance of any and all aesthetic sensibilities. Magnus hated it. He had spent decades attempting to coax Alec into moving into any of the many beautiful buildings New York had to offer (on a few drunken occasions, he had even been so bold as to suggest Alec move into his own Brooklyn brownstone), but the fool had yet to budge. For this reason, Magnus found himself standing in one of the ugliest buildings in the city, pounding on Alec’s door as if all the demons of Hell were on his heels.

They might as well have been.

He’d been hammering away for a solid thirty seconds, a bottle of obnoxiously expensive wine cradled in the crook of his arm, when the door finally swung open, revealing a bewildered looking Alec.

“What in the _heavens_ \--”

“Alexander! I have come to drink,” said Magnus cheerfully, hoisting the dusty bottle of wine into the air. He pushed past Alec, eyeing the familiar apartment with disdain. The uncultured eye would describe Alec’s style as ‘minimalist’, but ‘spartan’ was perhaps more accurate; Alec’s apartment was, above all, functional. Any added flair had been contributed by Magnus himself, who believed that living in the ugliest building in New York City did not mean that Alec had to live in the ugliest _apartment_ in New York City. The two had been engaged in a battle of wills over the apartment’s decor for years. Unfortunately, Alec was currently winning; the lovely throw blanket that Magnus had gifted him last month was nowhere to be seen, and neither was the Persian rug from the month before. This revelation only further dampened Magnus’ already terrible mood.

“It’s five in the morning, Magnus.”

“Indeed it is, angel,” said Magnus, setting the bottle of wine onto the immaculate island countertop and drifting through the kitchen with practiced ease. He threw open the cabinets, producing first two wine glasses, then a corkscrew, with which he deftly uncorked the bottle. “You know what they say. No rest for the wicked.”

With a devilish grin, he offered one of the glasses to Alec. Alec took it, albeit hesitantly, and allowed Magnus to clink their glasses together in a toast before taking a long sip, eyes locked on Magnus’.

They didn’t break contact until Magnus lowered his glass, idly swirling the contents around.

“Good wine.”

“Hmm,” hummed Magnus noncommittally. “Yes. Chateau Lafitte.” He swept the bottle up with one hand, admiring the way the red of the wine matched the burgundy varnish on his nails, and peered at the label. “1875.” After the dire events of the night before, he had promptly teleported into the home of a private collector and stolen it. Even for a demon, life was too short to drink terrible wine.

“Uh huh,” said Alec slowly, taking another sip. “Is everything… okay?”

He must have been sleeping, Magnus realized. His dark hair was mussed, sticking out at wild angles -- which meant very little, as Alec’s hair was _always_ a mess. Magnus found it both appalling and endearing. Pale bags pooled under his eyes, but did very little to diminish his handsome appearance. Illuminated by the thin streams of early light creeping through the window, he looked quite ethereal. As ethereal as anyone could look in adidas sweatpants and a plain gray T-shirt, anyway. Magnus vaguely wondered if this was what it would be like to spend lazy mornings with Alec.

Of course, in Magnus’ mind, those mornings would be spent in his own resplendently decorated apartment with Alec at _least_ half naked, but. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Everything is perfect,” Magnus replied with a cheeky smile. “In fact, I’ve just spent the last two hours in a quaint hospital in the middle of nowhere, ferrying the Antichrist from cradle to cradle in preparation for ‘The End of Times.” Magnus adopted a dramatic, stately voice for the last part. He sipped his wine. “She’s a lovely child.”

Alec’s jaw went slack and his eyes wide; it would have been downright comical if he wasn’t so damn handsome. They had both known this was coming -- in fact, they had expected it a long time ago. Despite thousands of years of preparation, Magnus still couldn’t help the nagging feeling telling him that it had come _too soon_. Alec tossed his head back and drained the contents of his glass; Magnus smirked, watching the lines it drew down the column of his throat, and followed suit.

Seventeen bottles of stolen wine later, the two had retired from the kitchen to the living room. Magnus was draped dramatically over a black divan that Alec steadfastly and ignorantly referred to as “the couch”. Alec sat stonily on a throne-like armchair across from him. Magnus had offered to make room (“There’s plenty of room underneath me, angel,”), and Alec had resolutely ignored him; the current setup made Magnus feel curiously as though he was lying in a therapist’s office, confessing his deepest secrets for psychoanalysis. Except in this situation, he was blind drunk. And so was the therapist.

“So,” slurred Alec. He had spent a good amount of time pretending to be sober before the wine had finally caught up to him. His perfectly erect posture had eventually given way, and he sat slumped to one side of the hideous gray armchair, head in his hand. “The Final Judgment. The Apogalypse. Th’ _En_ d of _Times_.”

Magnus stared up at the ceiling and drained another glass of wine. Even the _ceiling_ was ugly.

“Whaddaya gonna do?”

“I’m doing it,” said Magnus, blindly groping around the coffee table for the bottle of wine. Somewhere around the fifth bottle, Alec had finally done the honors and stolen a white wine. He had given feeble protests at first, but had eventually relented, and the latest bottle was of his choosing. It was good wine, but it didn’t have the _drama_ or _presence_ of the red wine, and therefore seemed sadly unsuited to the catastrophe at hand. Magnus sloshed some more of it into his glass. “‘M gonna drink.”

“C’mon, Magnus,” Alec said, turning his big, stupid eyes on Magnus, “what now?”

Magnus drained the glass again and set it on the coffee table. He rolled to his side; he was about halfway there before he realized it was a bad idea. The world spun around him. Maybe they could just stay like this, Magnus thought, staring blankly at the hideous apartment. Just him and Alec, the world spinning around them.

The world erupting into a fiery war zone, the world ending around them.

He frowned. He didn’t like that second part as much.

“I think I’m too drunk for this.”

Alec grunted in agreement and, despite his better judgment, Magnus sobered himself up.

He was still laying on the uncomfortable (but admittedly chic) divan in Alec’s upscale (but admittedly hideous) condo. Alec was still wearing black sweatpants and a tight shirt that did wonders for his chest and little for Magnus’ concentration. The world was still a few immortal breaths from ending around them.

Magnus immediately regretted sobering himself up. He wanted more wine. Or something stronger. He hadn’t done shots with Alec since the late 1980s, and he briefly wondered if the angel could be persuaded into downing a bottle of tequila. Desperate times, after all.

He forced himself into a sitting position, and ran a hand through his hair -- he’d been doing that for a few hours now, and his perfectly coiffed hair was now starting to look like Alec’s unruly mop. Hopefully it suited Magnus similarly. 

Across the coffee table, Alec seemed to have sobered up as well; he still looked completely miserable, but Alec often looked completely miserable regardless of the circumstances. At this point, it was more endearing than anything. Alec eyed his glass and the empty bottles with what was either disgust or bittersweet longing. It was always hard to tell with him.

He looked defeated. Magnus had spent the last few hours drunkenly explaining just why the End of All Times, the Apocalypse, the End of the World, the Big One, was bad. Heaven on Earth? That meant nothing. When it came down to it, Magnus was certain, neither of them really cared that much about the Cosmic Order. Alec liked to pretend he did, sure -- but the two of them cared about other things. Things like sandalwood shampoo, and seedy pool halls, and Belgian waffles, and DVR. _Human_ things. Heaven had none of that, Magnus had reminded Alec, and they had terrible music, bland food, and an overall lack of taste. He had slowly weaned Alec’s righteous rebuttals down to nothing but miserable drinking and occasional, half-hearted interjections. Magnus felt for the guy. He really did.

But he felt for himself more. Sure, Hell had better musicians, but the food wasn’t great either, and besides, eternal Hell on Earth would mean either an eternity of Fire and Brimstone or an eternity of mindless bureaucratic slavery, and the latter was decidedly worse. Magnus hated paperwork. He would do _anything_ to avoid that.

Magnus opened his mouth to continue his onslaught, but Alec cut him off first.

“I can’t interfere with divine plans,” he said miserably.

“Well, I can,” declared Magnus. “And I intend to.” He passed a hand through his messy hair, and it was suddenly perfect again. He even added a blonde streak for flair. Alec’s eyes lingered on it before dropping down to Magnus’ face, watching him dubiously.

“You’re sure it was the Antichrist?”

“Of course I am,” said Magnus, offended. “What other reason would I willingly spend my free time in this modernist trash can you call an apartment complex? By the way, where is that beautiful rug I gave you last year? It would look excellent on this divan.”

“That rug didn’t match a single thing in my apartment,” said Alec slowly. Magnus rolled his eyes, refusing to dignify that with a response. As an envoy from Heaven, Alec was inherently devoid of taste. It was a pity; if Alec was going to die in the rapidly approaching Apocalypse, he might as well do it in style.

Besides, Magnus had gone through quite a lot to get that rug.

Alec was giving him a strange look, the kind that said, _I can’t believe you’re choosing now, of all times, to pick apart my apartment_. “What happened, exactly?”

“I met a few -- terribly boring, I might add -- grunt workers from Hell in Utah, of all places, who gave me the baby. Popped back over here. Went to a Satanist church where a soon-to-be governor’s wife had the misfortune of giving birth, and swapped out the babies. And then I came here as fast as my cloven feet would take me with the intention of spending the next twenty years drinking with you until the inevitable end of the world.”

“I -- _what_? A Satanist Church? In _Utah_?”

“No,” said Magnus with a dismissive wave of his hand. “That was just the meeting point. Cosmic irony. I’m sorry, _infernal_ irony. One of the two.”

“Uh-huh,” said Alec slowly. He frowned, drawing a tiny crease between his eyebrows. “Wait, what did you do with the other baby?”

“I sacrificed her to almighty Satan,” said Magnus casually. Alec looked taken aback. “The stork delivered her to a happy, white, upper-middle class family to live out the American dream in peace, Alexander.”

That seemed to soothe Alec’s worries at least a bit, but his face was still contorted into a frown. “I can’t interfere with divine plans,” he repeated.

Of course he couldn’t. Angels -- loyal to a fault. Magnus’ lot wasn’t much better, he supposed. He couldn’t exactly disobey either. Not unless he wanted to be dragged down to the lower pits of Hell and tortured for insubordination. He wasn’t exactly sure what the angelic equivalent was for that. Either they kicked you to the curb and sent you tumbling down to Hell with the rest of the fallen angels, or they hooked you up to the Sound of Music or something equally bland for a couple of millennia for re-education.

Magnus studied his nails. Hell wasn’t all that bad.

But he certainly couldn’t handle Hell on Earth, and Heaven on Earth would be a death sentence. He stood and, after using a wave of his hand to iron out the wrinkles in his suit, began to pace slowly around Alec’s apartment. He stopped in front of the tall windows, staring out at the New York City skyline pensively. The one benefit of being inside the building, Magnus thought, was that he didn’t have to see the outside of it. Thank God for small blessings, or something like that. 

He watched the people down below. He could see each of them whirring away like tiny cogs in an enormous machine. Each one of them would have a part to play in the oncoming War. Some on the winning side, some on the losing side. All of them would die.

“What if you weren’t interfering with divine plans?” Magnus asked.

“Come again?”

“What if they’re diabolical plans?” Magnus asked, turning around slowly and pacing back towards Alec. “This is Hell’s scheme, after all.”

“But it’s not,” said Alec, a hint of smugness in his tone. “Overall, it’s part of the _divine_ plan. _The_ Plan.”

Magnus scoffed.

“It is!”

“Alright, angel,” said Magnus, waving a hand dismissively, “but in that case, how do you know that interfering isn’t part of the plan too?”

Alec was still shooting that suspicious look at him. Unlike Magnus, he hadn’t gone to any measures to make himself look presentable, but he still looked maddeningly good. “What do you mean?”

“As the envoy on earth, isn’t it your duty to thwart the wiles of Hell at every turn?” Magnus asked, making his way slowly around the armchair Alec was still perched on. “You see a wile -- you thwart. That’s the game, isn’t it?” Magnus ghosted a hand over the top of the chair and down the armrest as he rounded to face Alec, prompting Alec to yank his arm back as though he’d been shocked.

“...Yes,” said Alec, at length. And then, because he couldn’t stand being quiet for more than a moment or two, he added, “well, no, I mean -- it’s more beneficial if humans choose to do the actual thwarting --”

“-- because of _ineffability_ , yes,” finished Magnus. “But generally, you thwart.”

Alec studied him for a moment. He still wore that dubious expression, but his mouth quirked into what Magnus thought might be the beginnings of a smile. “Are you trying to tempt me?” he asked suspiciously.

 _How kind of you to notice_ , thought Magnus. He pushed that thought back. Instead he said, innocently, “All I’m saying, my dear Alexander, is that the birth is… irrelevant. The _upbringing_ is the most important part, and I’m certain that the forces of Hell,” he said, motioning to himself with a flourish, “will be _heavily_ invested in influencing the girl.” He leaned in toward Alec to pluck the wine glass from his hand, and then whirled around toward the bottle-laden coffee table. When he picked up the Chateau-Lafitte, it was conveniently full again.

Understanding flashed through Alec’s eyes. He stood abruptly. “I don’t believe my superiors would mind me... thwarting you,” Alec said, slowly. “For the sake of the cosmic balance, of course.”

“Oh, of course.”

“But what will happen if she doesn’t have a… _demonic_ upbringing?”

Magnus shrugged. “She’ll probably never know.”

“But, genetically--”

“Pardon my language, angel, but to Hell with genetics,” said Magnus absently, refilling their wine glasses. “Genetically, I’m as much an angel as you are. As is Satan himself.” Alec looked a little uncomfortable at that, but he didn’t protest. “No, the upbringing is important. Without an unopposed demonic upbringing, I can’t imagine that she will grow to be the False Messiah,” said Magnus thoughtfully. “No, at the very least, Hell will have to start over again, and it will buy us a few more years. How does that sound?” He held a wine glass out to Alec.

Alec bit his lower lip in thought, and then his face broke into that small, lopsided smile of his. “Yeah,” said Alec slowly, accepting the wine glass. “Yeah, okay. I mean… it’s worth a shot?”

Magnus beamed. “Wonderful,” he said, raising his glass and clinking it with Alec’s. “To us. It will be fun! We’ll be like -- like godfathers to the child.”

“Godfathers,” repeated Alec. Magnus nodded.  They both took a long sip, smiling.

It was a terrible plan.

* * *

 

But as far as terrible plans went, it was pretty fun -- and it wasn’t the worst plan Magnus had ever concocted. Probably the worst Alec had ever gone along with, but fun nevertheless.

Privately, Alec kind of thought of it as coparenting, and he had the feeling that Magnus did too. Out loud, they referred to it as The Arrangement. Between the two of them, they made a veritable parade of nannies, tutors, groundskeepers, and butlers, each one dedicated wholeheartedly toward tipping young Camille Belcourt either which way on the cosmic scale. Magnus, in the form of a nanny, a tutor, a beloved friend, taught Camille about the Darkness Inherent to Mankind, about grievous horrors committed throughout human history, ultimately attempting to instill a complete disregard for living things in the young girl. Alec, in the form of a groundskeeper, a tutor, a beloved Uncle (to which side of the family he belonged, the Belcourts could never quite remember), taught Camille about love and selflessness, the value that a single kind act could have, and overall reverence for life.

The two of them passed eleven years like that -- a continual back and forth, each of them a constant presence in the girl’s life, and in each other’s. The two had been close for centuries -- far closer than they should have been, a nagging voice at the back of Alec’s mind told him, but he pushed that thought back just like he pushed correspondence letters from heaven straight into the garbage can. It got lost on the way down, he said when someone from Up There finally decided to come visit him about it. What else could he say? He certainly couldn’t tell them that he was too busy playing house with a demon, of all things, to brush up on _An Angelic Envoy From Heaven’s Etiquette Guide_. The thing was longer than the Bible and was more suited to being a weapon or a paperweight than any kind of comprehensive guide. The Apocalypse would be long over by the time he had finished it.

(And it didn’t say a single thing about flirting with a demon, anyway. Alec had checked.)

So the two of them wove themselves in and out of Camille’s life, and closer into each other’s. For every instance that they passed each other on their ways out of the Belcourt household, they arranged drinks. Dinner. A brunch date.

Unbeknownst to either of them, they were quite the source of gossip in their many forms. Mrs. Belcourt had been suspicious of the young, beautiful nanny when she first arrived, only to be appeased when the nanny was heard calling the groundskeeper angel in that lovely voice of hers. Bets were placed on when the beloved family friend and the favorite uncle would announce their relationship. There was a strange tension underlying the interactions of the two tutors that was noticed by all -- all except the two in question.

But all in all, things were going well (or, as well as they could go with the impending Great War looming overhead), and with each instance of jokes over dinner, or deep conversation lasting into the night over a bottle of wine, Alec guiltily told himself that something good had come from the Apocalypse.

* * *

 

Before either of them knew it, eleven years had passed.

Camille grew up to be quite a normal young girl. She had a mean streak, which Magnus assumed was normal for children of her age, but she  was also capable of great kindnesses. She liked video games and chocolate and playing with her mother’s makeup. She was the supposed daughter of a highly influential American politician, perfectly placed to unleash chaos when she came into her role.

And yet, something seemed wrong.

Magnus drummed his fingers on the table. He and Alec were in an extremely crowded, extremely fancy restaurant in Soho, enjoying a casually romantic dinner and comparing notes. It was hard work raising the Antichrist, after all.

“Magnus? Are you alright?” asked Alec, fork hovering over his plate. They had long ago finished dinner and graduated to desert. Alec was eating a sumptuous devil’s food cake. There was an innuendo waiting in that, but Magnus was too distracted to go for it.

“Something doesn’t seem right,” said Magnus.

“If you don’t like it, just send it back to the kitchen,” said Alec, motioning with his fork toward Magnus’ nearly untouched creme brulee.

“Not that,” said Magnus, but he forwent his own desert in favor of leaning over and stealing a bite of Alec’s cake. Alec frowned. “Alexander, you don’t think Camille is too… normal?”

Alec chewed slowly, lowering his fork. Magnus took that as a sign he was allowed to steal more, but when he went to take another bite, Alec batted Magnus’ fork away with his own. “Doesn’t that mean The Arrangement is working?”

“I suppose it’s a good thing she’s not off torturing woodland creatures or practicing occult witchcraft,” commented Magnus. He relented, and began torturing his own creme-brulee instead of vying after Alec’s cake. “But she should be doing _something_ by now. She should be molding the world around her, playing with the fabric of reality and shaping it to her liking.” He punctuated the sentence with a flourish of his fork. He had always been a hand-talker. “She shouldn’t be reading Harry Potter and giving her friends makeovers.” Well, she could, but with her power she could literally will Hogwarts into existence on a whim. Magnus dropped the fork onto the plate with a clatter, earning a glare from an attractive man at a nearby table. Magnus winked. “I can’t help but wonder how she’ll respond to the hell-hound.”

Alec’s gaze darted from Magnus to the man he had winked at, and then back to Magnus. The man’s baked Alaska suddenly flamed blue, seemingly without an attendant or even a lighter. “I’m sorry? The what?”

“The hell-hound,” repeated Magnus, watching as the flame spread down to the tablecloth. The man doused the fire with an atrociously expensive glass of red wine, effectively ruining his dessert, the table cloth, and his well-tailored suit in one go. Alec looked immensely pleased. Magnus raised an eyebrow.

“Good cake,” Alec explained with wide, innocent eyes, gesturing down at his plate with his fork.

“So it would seem,” said Magnus with a hint of amusement. “Hell is sending her a hell-hound on her eleventh birthday, to guard her from harm and to test her. The naming is important. It gives it purpose. I suppose she’ll name it something threatening. Beast, or Killer, or something equally awful.”

“Creative. You’ll be there?”

“Of course. Duty calls,” said Magnus, wistfully. Gone were the carefree years cruising around Earth. The last eleven years had been more business than the previous six thousand years on Earth combined, and Magnus was beginning to miss the pleasure aspect. He finally took a bite of his creme-brulee. He should probably start enjoying the finer things in life before they were destroyed by a nuclear war or a freak asteroid collision, or whatever grisly end an eleven year old girl could dream up for them. “I hope it scares her and she turns it away,” Magnus admitted. “If she actually does name it, the End will be unavoidable.”

Alec frowned. His hand darted forward for a second, as though he was going to settle it over Magnus’, but he pulled it back just as quickly. For an angel, Alec was particularly terrible at comforting people. And not setting strangers’ desserts on fire, it would seem. “I think I’ll join you,” Alec said, finally.

“Wonderful,” said Magnus, taking a swig off his wine with a raised eyebrow. “It’s a date.”

**Wednesday**

It was a date. It was the exact date, that was, and the exact time, too. Three o’clock in the afternoon on Camille Belcourt’s eleventh birthday, surrounded by a horde of screaming children and a veritable wall of broad shouldered men wearing dark sunglasses and dark suits. The party was being held in the Prince George Ballroom -- because as wealthy as they were, Camille’s parents didn’t really talk to her, and had yet to realize that even filthy rich children would rather have a birthday party at Coney Island than in a stuffy ballroom. Still, it was quite the event. There was face-painting, balloon making, even a clown -- all the kinds of things children had stopped caring about around the time video games were invented. It was Alec’s worst nightmare.

Camille had spent the last hour ferociously tearing into a mountain of presents, but she had yet to receive the most important one. She was currently chasing around a terrified looking little boy with a lightsaber. The hell-hound was nowhere to be seen.

It was five past three. Alec turned to Magnus.

“Where is the dog?” he asked, voice tight.

“Fashionably late?” Magnus tried, his voice tinged with an edge of panic. “Punctuality _is_ a virtue, after all.”

In six thousand years of companionship, the only time Alec had seen Magnus panicked had been when he had arrived on his doorstep eleven years ago with a bottle of stolen wine, his hair the messiest Alec had ever seen it. Magnus looked well on his way to that point now. There was, regrettably, no alcohol at an eleven year old’s birthday party, so Magnus had resorted to just running his hands through his hair, and one lock of brightly colored hair was dangling dangerously forward.

Alec stared at him in disbelief. Magnus’ eyes flicked down to his watch. Like everything about Magnus, it was very expensive, and very flashy. Alec glanced pointedly down at his own simple watch.

3:07.

Magnus cursed under his breath and turned abruptly, seeking out the nearest exit. Alec dazedly watched him go. Magnus, with all his poise and presence, cut an elegant figure gliding through the ballroom, and Alec couldn’t help but stop and appreciate it for a moment -- until he remembered that he was annoyed at Magnus, and stalked out after him. At least it took him away from the cacophonous shrieking of pubescent children.

Outside, Magnus was throwing open the door of his car. It was a Ferrari, and because Magnus was incurably incapable of subtlety, it was pink. From what Alec understood, they didn’t make pink Ferraris, but Magnus was very persuasive, as the demon had informed him with a waggle of his eyebrows. The car matched the pink streak in his hair.

Alec slipped into the passenger seat. Magnus fiddled with the radio, turning it all the way to an impossible 66.6 FM.

A booming voice filled the car, and Alec flinched.

_“WHO DARES TO CALL UPON THE FORCES OF HELL, TO DISTURB THE PRINCE OF --”_

“It’s me, you old bat,” said Magnus, rolling his eyes.

 _“MAGNUS,”_ said the voice dejectedly. _“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”_

“It’s always a pleasure to speak with you, Ragnor. I’m calling about the hell-hound. To make sure everything is going...okay,” he finished lamely.

_“THE BEAST. YES. RELEASED TEN MINUTES AGO. IS IT NOT THERE?”_

Alec cursed under his breath, glaring at Magnus. Magnus glared back.

 _“MAGNUS? WHAT WAS THAT?”_ asked the other demon. After a pause he added, knowingly, _“YOU’RE NOT WITH THAT ANGEL AGAIN, ARE YOU, MAGNUS? WE’VE TALKED ABOU--”_

“And here comes the hell-hound now! Good dog. Terrifying. Beautiful job, Ragnor, really. I would hate to further interrupt your very busy day. I’ll see you some other time, we can celebrate with drinks. Talk to you later,” said Magnus in a rush, flipping the radio off quickly. He took in a shaky breath and looked up at Alec.

The two spoke at the same time.

“No dog --”

“You talk to your coworkers about me?”

Even Alec was shocked at his question. Magnus stared at him in bewilderment, color rising to his cheeks. The deflating lock of pink hair finally drooped completely, falling dramatically against Magnus’ forehead. Alec’s finger twitched with the desire to push it out of his face.

“ _That’s_ \-- you know what, never mind that,” said Magnus, yanking his seatbelt on. He ignited the car with a wave of his hand. It revved to life immediately. “How could there be no dog? We have to figure this out.”

His hands settled on the steering wheel. After a moment, he turned to look at Alec expectantly. His eyes drifted slowly from Alec’s face down to his torso. Alec could feel his face flushing under the demon’s heavy gaze, something -- anticipation? mortification? -- twisting in his abdomen. Finally, he snapped, “What?”

“Your seatbelt, Alexander.”

Oh. That. Now Alec really did blush.

* * *

 

Fairmond was a small, boring town nestled in upstate New York. With only a couple thousand residents, it was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where you could slip into anyone’s house for lunch and their mom would fix you something, where the high school teachers told you long winded stories about when your older sister, or your father, or your great-great grandmother was their student. It was a paradise for children, who slipped away from home and down the dirt road to the forest with ease, to spend days exploring and causing trouble. To teenagers, it was a hell with no shopping mall, and very little to do aside from smoking pot.

Clary Fray loved it.She had spent her entire life in Fairmond, and though she wanted to see the world, there was something about her hometown had always felt special. It was her eleventh birthday, and she was traipsing through the forest with a big stick, like some kind of wizened old wizard. Her best friend, Simon, traipsed along with her, and so did their friend Maureen. The three of them were full of cake and the kind of untapped energy that only came from being children with no parental supervision and a big forest to explore.

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” said Simon, pushing his glasses up his nose. They were round and comically large, magnifying his big, brown eyes into saucers. To his left, something terrible stalked through the undergrowth of the bushes, something large and heaving, with teeth sharper than a knife. Simon prattled on, oblivious. “I thought the lightsaber was the best.”

“That’s cuz you’re a nerd,” said Maureen, wiping a hand over her face and leaving a streak of dirt across her brown skin. She didn’t react when a sharp snapping came from the bushes, followed by the sound of a small animal shrieking in agony.  “The bike was cooler. Even had a basket.”

“The bike’s alright. Clary, you’re not sad, are you?”

“Why would I be?” asked Clary. Her bright red curls were pulled back from her face, and her green eyes gleamed in the midday sun. Her pale skin was flushed with color, and she was beginning to freckle on her arms, as she did every summer. She was happy. She was eleven. She didn’t know why, but it felt big. Like something was going to change. Most importantly, she was with her best friends in the world, the forest spread out ahead of them, just waiting to be explored.

Simon hesitated, eyes flicking to Maureen. It wasn’t subtle -- not with those glasses. “Well… I know you wanted a dog….”

“I am getting a dog!” said Clary brightly. She was sure of it. “My dad’s gonna get me one.”

Maureen looked at her skeptically. “Your dad’s _allergic_ to dogs, Cl-- ouch! What was that for?” Shel turned to glare at Simon, who had smacked her on the arm. Naturally, she smacked him back. Much harder. Simon wailed.

“It’s Clary’s birthday, you can’t just smash her hopes and dreams!” Simon glared fiercely, rubbing at the bright red spot left on his arm.

“I’m not,” said Maureen,. She rolled her big eyes. “But you _know_ Luke isn’t gonna do it. Parents never give you what you want. It’s always somethin’ _boring_. I wanted a PS4 for _my_ birthday. All I got were some stupid books.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re dumb and ought to read more,” offered Simon helpfully. It earned him another smack.

“I’m getting a dog,” said Clary again. She jumped up onto a fallen tree, using the walking stick as leverage. She hadn’t noticed the rustling in the foliage either, or the glimpses of dark fur and dripping saliva that kept peeking through the trees. She passed the stick to Simon, and walked down the fallen tree like a tightrope, arms stretched out for balance. Her two friends followed her as they often did, eyes turned up to watch her go. There was something about Clary that made her impossible to ignore. She was a natural leader with a kind of gravitational pull that yanked people in, and Simon and Maureen were no exception. Most importantly, she was fun. There was never a dull day when the three of them were together.

“Uh-huh,” said Maureen skeptically. “What kinda dog?”

“I dunno,” admitted Clary. “Somethin’... fun. And cute. Not too big.” The heavy footsteps prowling through the undergrowth suddenly became a lot lighter. “The kinda dog you can play with. Not too fancy. A mutt. With spots.” The coarse black fur faded to something much lighter, something pale and mottled with dark spots, a particularly large one covering the floppy left ear.

“How d’you know? Did he tell you?”

“I just _know_ ,” said Clary. She had come to the end of the fallen tree, and was ready to jump down, when a thought hit her, and she gasped. She whirled around, careful not to lose her footing, and beamed. “And it’s still going to be a puppy!”

The bushes had fallen quiet. Where there had once been a hulking beast of a dog, black and ravenous, with sharp teeth and beady eyes, there now paced a bespotted puppy with floppy ears.

“Yeah? What’re you gonna name it, Clary?”

Clary hopped down from the log, and thought about it. Around her, the forest pulsed with unbridled energy, something neither light nor dark, something bright and charged. The question hung heavy in the air, the forest quiet except for the neverending chirping of cicadas. Clary tapped a finger against her chin. “Somethin’ classic. The kinda dog names you hear in movies.” Her beatific smile spread, and she snapped her fingers. “Spot!”

The energy in the forest snapped, like a cord pulled too taut finally reaching the breaking point, and out from the underbrush, a puppy came running out. Not the kind of dog that thought about disemboweling people with its teeth and dragging them down to trails, but one that wanted to fetch and roll over and play dead. And most importantly, it wanted its master. It bounded right up to Clary.

* * *

 

Alec had hardly said a word the entire ride. Magnus was flying down the freeway at 90 miles an hour, deftly darting in and out of traffic. Alec’s jaw was set, and his arms were folded tightly across his chest. They had been at it for a couple of hours, Magnus mentally trying to retrace his steps back to that foreboding church after eleven years. It was hard. It wasn’t like they could pull over and ask a local which way to the nearest Satanist church, after all. The only civilization they had passed in the last thirty minutes had been an Amish settlement, if one could consider that civilization. Magnus wasn’t even sure if the place existed anymore.

“Okay, you’ve had some time,” Magnus said finally. They flew past a sign. Five miles to Fairmond. Twenty miles to Schenectady. “Go ahead, Alexander.”

Alec glared at him, jaw flexing. His silent treatment was brutal. Magnus knew this better than anyone; Alec had once refused to talk to him for nearly fifty years after Magnus had finally managed to perfect what Alec deemed, “the greatest blight on humankind since Biblical Times”. To be fair, Alec had never been a fan of pineapple -- putting it on pizza had simply been the last straw.

When Alec continued to stare resolutely out the window, Magnus changed his strategy. He pulled the car roughly to the side of the road and killed the engine. He turned in his seat to look at Alec. “Come on, angel,” he all but purred, slowly walking his fingers across the console and toward Alec’s leg. “How much longer are you going to hold out on me?” he asked, voice dripping with the innuendo.

“Stop that,” snapped Alec, his cheeks flushing a lovely red. “How, Magnus? How could you _lose_ the _Antichrist_?”

“Why are you so certain this is my fault?”

Alec let out a strangled scream and threw the door open. He glared at Magnus and pointedly unbuckled his seatbelt before pushing up out of the car. He slammed the door roughly behind him, then stalked off down the road.

Magnus thumped his head against the headrest with a sigh, and then followed Alec out of the car.

He had pulled over into a field. They were on some kind of back country road, and there was little traffic. Yellowed hills rolled out for miles under the setting sun, and the sky was painted in vibrant hues of orange and pink, tinged purple on the horizon. Alec paced up ahead, the picture of misery set before a beautiful backdrop.

“Alexander,” called Magnus, to no avail -- Alec kept walking. “I’ll be damned if I chase after you,” muttered Magnus under his breath, but after a few moments of watching Alec’s form shrink down the road, Magnus took off after him.

Why not? He was already damned, and he’d already spent plenty of time chasing after Alec. He didn’t see either of those things changing now.

Once he had caught up with Alec, Magnus reached a hand out to catch his arm, but Alec stopped abruptly in front of him. Magnus collided with the angel awkwardly.

“Alec, what are you --”

Alec turned around abruptly. Magnus took a step back, intensely aware of how close they were standing.

“I feel something,” said Alec in a rush.

“Huh?”

“Love,” said Alec. He licked his lips, eyes flicking down to Magnus, then out to scan the countryside. He looked lovely, limned in the light of the setting sun. Magnus’s heart pounded an erratic beat against his ribs. The sound of rushing blood echoed in his ears.

“Alexander, I--”

“I wouldn’t expect _you_ to understand,” said Alec with a scowl, and he began pacing again. Magnus’ words died in his throat, and he watched the angel for a moment in silence. “I just -- there’s something here, I can feel it. Love.” He stopped abruptly again, eyes peering out at the field, narrowing at the point where it met a dense forest on the horizon. “Someone really loves it here. It feels so… cherished.”

“Huh,” said Magnus tightly. He swallowed, willing his throat to work. “Are you sure you’re not just being oversensitive?’

Alec glared at him. “Look,” he started harshly, “I already said you wouldn’t get it--”

“-- Yes, I heard you --”

“-- but I can’t explain it. Someone really _loves_ this place, Magnus.”

“Maybe the people who live here just like it?”

Alec rolled his eyes. “I’ve never felt anything like this in Manhattan.” He paused. “Okay, yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“A few of my favorite words.”

“Don’t sound so smug,” snapped Alec. “You lost the Antichrist! This is why it’s impossible to trust your side with anything. Evil always contains the seed of its own destruction.”

Magnus rolled that thought around in his head for a minute, and then shrugged. “For what it’s worth, Alexander, I think it was just average incompetence.”

Alec sighed, deflating. After a moment of petulantly kicking at the gravel of the dirt road and a bit of nagging from Magnus,he was finally persuaded to get back in the car.

The car ride was tense. Magnus was careful to speed down the busy roads, casually arranging for no other cars to be in his way, but Alec didn’t say anything about it. Magnus was half tempted to jump the divider and drive the wrong way down the freeway to get a rise out of the angel, but as far as driving in New York went, that was pretty much par for the course. The whole state was filled with terrible drivers, and Magnus hadn’t lifted a finger to accomplish _that_.

“Where are we going, anyway?” asked Alec finally. “I thought you got the baby in Utah?”

“That was just for the pick up. I told you, cosmic irony. We’re going to the church the swap took place at. There must have been a mix-up.” Magnus paused. “Well, not the _right_ mix-up, anyway. There must be something there we can use -- records, at the very least.”

“You took the Antichrist to a _church_?” asked Alec, horrified.

“It wasn’t one of _your_ churches.”

Alec thought that over for a moment, and then stared at Magnus, aghast. “Magnus -- you took a _baby_ to a _Satanist church_?”

“She is the daughter of Satan himself, Alexander. And besides, it isn’t all ritual sacrifice and blood orgies,” said Magnus wistfully. _Those were the days_. Humans were much less inclined to that kind of thing nowadays. Magnus blamed the internet. He let that last comment sit in the air before adding, “Only on the weekends.”

Alec glared at him. “How do you know the baby isn’t…”

“Dead? If she showed up Down There again, I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here. She’s probably gallivanting in picket-fenced Suburbia somewhere. It was the worst fate I could come up with,” said Magnus, thoughts flickering back to the switch. It had all gone by so fast. He had traded one screaming baby for another. One had gone on to live in the lap of luxury in a Manhattan high-rise, to be corrupted and blessed by demonic and angelic influences until she either fizzled out or blew the world up around her. The other had gone to a suburb in the middle of nowhere, to spend her days kicking around soccer balls with her friends, to grow up and get married and have children and die in the same seven-mile radius. It was a fate worse than death.

And then, something had gone wrong. Magnus just wasn’t sure what. It had been simple -- swap one baby for the other. How could he possibly have messed that up?

Alec was watching Magnus with a funny expression. “What?”

“So you… you did give her to a suitable family?”

“I think the mother was a vegan, but other than that, they were alright.” Magnus paused. “Wait -- did you really spend the last eleven years thinking I had killed a baby, Alec?”

Alec studied his face for a moment. His eyes flicked toward the dark road ahead, then back to Magnus. “No,” he said with an air of finality. “I didn’t.” And then, because he couldn’t leave it at that, he said, “Look, Magnus -- for what it’s worth, I...I’ve always known that deep down, you’re really a g--”

“Please don’t finish that sentence, Alexander. You’re going to get me demoted,” said Magnus, waving an elegant finger to silence Alec. Professionally, he couldn’t handle being complimented by an angel, and personally, he couldn’t handle being complimented by Alec. He pulled the car down a dirt road. “Look, we’re here.”

* * *

 

Alec was… disappointed. In the dim light of the evening, the church looked quite normal, like any other weathered county church in the middle of nowhere. It was big and it was shabby, the kind of place that would host community potlucks where cardigan-wearing grandmothers and ponytailed soccer moms would battle for dominance through highly coveted and heavily guarded family recipes while bored children screamed and begged for McDonald’s. Aside from the huge upside-down cross on the facade, it looked like any of the thousands of boring churches scattered across the United States that Alec had visited to grant miracles and answer prayers. Most of those prayers had been for a Happy Meal.

Alec followed Magnus up the rickety steps of the church in trepidation.

On the porch, as if in afterthought, sat a plaster, chest-high statue of Baphomet in all his winged, horned glory. He had certainly seen better days; something that looked suspiciously like bird droppings sullied his right wing, and one of his horns was significantly shorter than the other. Around his neck was a sign that declared, in bold red letters, “NO SOLICITING”.

“‘As above, so below,’” quoted Magnus, eying the statue’s hands -- one extended up toward the heavens, the other down toward Hell. He rubbed the enormous goat head on the nose. “For luck,” he explained to Alec cheerfully. Alec rolled his eyes.

“Wait,” said Alec when Magnus leaned forward to open the doors, “can I even go in there?”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” teased Magnus, pushing the door open. With a dramatic flourish, he waved Alec in ahead of him.

Alec frowned, but he took a hesitant step into the building. When it appeared that he was not going to burst into flame or be dragged down into the pits of Hell or be forced to eat a questionable looking green bean casserole by someone’s Satanist grandmother, he turned and fixed Magnus with an unimpressed look.

“It’s mostly smoke and mirrors,” admitted Magnus, snapping his fingers to summon a dancing red flame. Its light bounced off the walls, showing a relatively normal congregation hall. Worn looking pews stretched out in rows toward a raised platform bearing a simple looking lectern with an upside-down cross. A few small speakers and a drum set indicated that it was the kind of place where a community band liked to set-up shop and torture the congregation with religious soft-rock. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of them believe,” continued Magnus, casually waltzing further into the room as if he owned the place, “but you just don’t find the kind of all-consuming belief that bursts angels into flame these days.” He flicked his eyes up and down Alec’s body for a moment. “Probably for the best. I’d hate to see you discorporated. I’ve grown far too fond of that body.”

Alec’s face contorted in confusion. “Why?”

Magnus fixed Alec with a sad expression, the one he reserved only for when he thought Alec was being very, very stupid. “I don’t know why I even bother,” he said tiredly. “Anyway, this is where the switch took place. Mr. and Mrs. Belcourt just happened to be making their way back to New York when she went into labor, and the local hospital was sadly... under infestation that night,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on what, exactly, had infested the hospital and Alec felt an involuntary shiver run down his spine -- but that could have been the draft. The place wasn’t exactly well maintained. “This was the closest place with a midwife. It was perfectly coordinated, until the little bundles of joy went and got themselves switched around.”

“ _You_ got them switched around.”

“I just can’t imagine how,” said Magnus thoughtfully. “It was a very simple switch.” He snapped his fingers, and the lights went up. “‘Let there be light,’” he joked. Alec didn’t find it funny, and he fixed Magnus with a look that said as much. The red flame died in Magnus’ hand.

“You’re sure there’s no one here?” Alec asked wearily.

Magnus dismissed his concern with a wave. “Probably not. There used to be nuns --”

“-- what, is this a _Catholic_ Satanist church?”

“It’s called ‘Black Mass’ for a reason, Alexander. They were mostly positioned here to lead up to that night. I doubt anyone stuck around.” Magnus ran a finger down one of the pews, then examined the thin layer of dust on his finger. “I’m amazed this place is still here, to tell you the truth. I was certain they would have razed it to the ground.”

“Yeah, well, thank God for small blessings,” said Alec.

“We need to search for records,” said Magnus. “or some kind of document, an artist’s rendition -- anything.”

They split up. Alec wasn’t exactly happy about the situation. Breaking and entering and looting around in the dead of night was already pretty unseemly for an angel, but in a _Satanic temple_ of all places -- Alec wasn’t quite sure how he would explain that to his superiors. He hoped he never had to. In fact, if he and Magnus didn’t sort this mess out soon, he probably wouldn’t have to -- if they didn’t find the Antichrist before news of this reached Heaven, he would be be burned to a crisp before he even had the chance to open his mouth.

Thankfully, the church really was like any other rural church in the world, albeit a little bit bigger. Other than the crudely-drawn demonic sigils here and there or the mysterious stains marring the floor of the pulpit, the place was completely normal. There was a congregation hall, and a kitchen filled with mismatched dishes left behind by generations of grandmothers. There was a quaint nursery full of outdated toys, the wall painted with an unsettling mural of cartoon witches and demons dancing around a fire. Contrary to Alec’s expectations, all of the witches and demons were fully clothed. There was a room that had probably been an office at some point, but was now used as a makeshift storage room. Alec shifted around a box filled with wrought-iron candelabras and nearly knocked over a stack of CDs featuring a poorly photoshopped cover of three middle-aged men and a teenage guitar player standing in the pits of Hell.

The storage room was probably the best place to start, but after a few minutes of pushing boxes around and awkwardly nudging at ritual artifacts, Alec was beginning to lose hope. He threw open a closet in frustration, only to get the scare of his life when a huge and incredibly detailed Beelzebub piñata come flying down from the top shelf. Alec reacted before he had the chance to restrain himself, neatly shooting the head of the thing off with a burst of heavenly fire that echoed through the church.

There was the thudding of incoming steps, and then Magnus burst into the room. He collapsed against the door frame in laughter when he saw the singed body of the piñata, Alec’s shocked face, and the bits of papier-mâché debris floating down around the angel.

“Oh my God,” Magnus laughed. “Is that Beelzebub? A rather flattering rendition, if you ask me. Come here,” he said, stepping closer to Alec, “you’ve got something in your hair.”

Alec stopped breathing (to be fair, he didn’t really have to breathe in the first place -- it was mostly habit at this point) when Magnus’ hand drifted to his hair, gently brushing away bits of burnt papier-mâché. He couldn’t quite get his tongue to work.

“Glitter looks good on you,” joked Magnus, seemingly unaware of the internal crisis pounding away at the inside of Alec’s chest.

“Uh,” said Alec thickly.

 _Damn it. Damn it all to Hell_ , Alec thought.

The nice thing about being an angel sequestered on earth with humans for thousands of years was that it was a lot easier to get away with simple vices. Things like lying, for example, or cutting people off in parking lots. Alec wouldn’t admit it (not to any angel, and especially not to a demon), but he had his own vices, and the worst one was probably simple self-deceit -- because the only way Alec knew how to handle this… _thing_ with Magnus was by lying to himself. But in times like these, when Magnus was brushing a warm hand through his hair, or when the two of them were singing along to the radio together, or when Magnus’ boisterous flirting gave way to gentle, genuine praise, Alec wondered how much worse it would be to just be honest with himself.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to be honest, because at that moment a woman came bursting into the small storage room. Magnus whirled around in surprise, and was immediately met with a thick cloud of mace to the face.

“By the Devil himself --” hissed Magnus, hand flying up toward his eyes. They were flashing gold, and Alec could already see the thin black pupil that ran through them, a demonic mark that only appeared when Magnus dropped his guard. Alec flinched. That wouldn’t have done much to a demon, but it was probably at least a little annoying.

“What the Hell are you doing in here?!” The woman shrieked. “ I’ll have you know, I’ve called the poli--”

Alec snapped his fingers. The woman’s eyes went vacant, a blank mask sliding down over her face. Her body crumpled, and Magnus lunged forward, catching her before she hit the floor.

“Really, Alexander?”

“Sorry.” Alec winced. “I panicked. What was I supposed to tell her?”

Magnus didn’t have a good answer to that. Instead, he lowered the woman to the ground with care, and Alec felt something clench in his chest at the gentleness of the gesture. He hadn’t exactly been lying earlier, when he had tried to tell Magnus he was a good guy.

Magnus propped the woman up by the door. She looked like she had just rushed from bed, and Alec felt guilty. She wore a light purple robe over black pajamas. Her red hair was swept back into a loose ponytail. She wore a ring with a huge pentagram on her left hand. She didn’t look like a Satanist, but she did look like someone who would force-feed you a particularly nasty potato salad at a potluck.

Alec watched silently as Magnus studied the woman’s face. She seemed perfectly relaxed or completely high, as if there was nowhere else she would rather be than sitting on the floor in a random office in the dead of night with two strange men and a decapitated demon pinata.

“Iris Rouse?” asked Magnus finally. The woman nodded in a daze. Magnus beamed. “You are a nun here, are you not?”

“Yes,” Iris said.

“Sister Rouse, do you recall an incident involving the switching of babies, about eleven years ago?”

Alec watched intently. Something shifted on the woman’s face, as if she was dredging memories up from a deep abyss. “Yes,” she said slowly.

“Do you recall any way this incident could have gone wrong, Sister Rouse?”

The woman shrugged. “I remember the babies. They were all very sweet.”

Magnus frowned, eyes flicking toward Alec. Alec raised his eyebrows in a silent question, until Magnus asked, slowly, “How many babies, Sister Rouse?”

“Three.”

Alec froze. _Three?_ Magnus shrugged helplessly, and Alec could see the gears whirring away inside his head; if it wasn’t the other baby, who Magnus said was safely in Florida, and it wasn’t Camille…

There must have been another birth in the church that night.

“Where do you keep records, Sister?”

“There aren’t any,” Iris said, “there was a big fire just after the switch. Everything was lost.”

 _Damn_ , thought Alec, his earlier words sounding in his head. Evil always contained the seed of its own destruction. Alec shot Magnus a pointed look, as if to say, _I told you so_. Magnus raised an eyebrow in response, as if to say, _I have no idea what you are talking about._

“Sister Rouse, do you kno--”

The sound of police sirens echoed through the night, cutting Magnus off. “Shit,” he muttered. He stood from where he had been crouched next to Iris and dusted his pants off with a wave of his hand.

“We should go,” said Alec, darting around Magnus to part the blinds on the window. Red lights bounced around in the dark of the night. “Any more more miracles, and we’re going to catch someone’s attention upstairs. Or downstairs.”

“I suppose you’re right,” grumbled Magnus.

“Some of my favorite words,” Alec shot back. It was enough to bring a touch of a smile to Magnus’ lips.

Alec turned to Iris, fixing her with a guilty look. “Look… Sister Rouse,” said Alec, “you’re going to wake up in thirty seconds. You sleepwalked to the office, and fell asleep having a nice dream about….. something. Whatever you like. Uh… Sweet dreams.” The sound of sirens continued, intensified by the crunching of tires against gravel.

Magnus put a hand on Alec’s arm. “Ready?”

The two took off before Iris could wake up, racing through the church and slipping out the front door. As Magnus had always said, it was very easy to go unnoticed when you simply focused on being as unobtrusive as possible, even if that meant tearing away from a Satanic Church in a Barbie sports car in the middle of the night.

“‘Sweet dreams,’” Magnus cooed from the safety of his car. “It’s sweet when you act kind, Alexander.”

“I’m always kind,” snapped Alec unkindly.

“Yes, I can see that,” said Magnus, amused. “Part of the job description, I’m sure.” His eyes gaze to the receding image of the church in the rearview mirror. The car flew down the road at 95 miles per hour.

“Three babies?” asked Alec. “Where did the third one come from?”

“I’m as shocked as you are.” Magnus drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “The hospital was closed down. That church was the closest place with a midwife, we made sure of that. It’s entirely possible another woman went into labor and was directed here.”

In fact, that was _exactly_ what had happened. Jocelyn Fray had gone into labor around the same time Mr. Belcourt’s plane had landed at the Fairmond air base. Jocelyn Fray had been turned away from the hospital from a slack-jawed, vacant-eyed receptionist who told her the entire hospital was “out of order” due to “infestation”, despite the fact that business was obviously going on as usual. Jocelyn Fray had, strangely, complied. Her baby was born in the backroom of a Satanist church, surrounded by encouraging nuns wearing strange headdresses and, in a move very similar to the kind of magic trick where a ball is shuffled around under a trio of cups, was quickly whisked away and swapped out for another one. The baby that was brought back to Jocelyn was healthy and beautiful, with bright red tufts of hair just like her mother’s. Jocelyn’s real daughter went home with the Belcourt’s, to be spoiled in material goods, but not attention. The Belcourt’s daughter got the worst fate of them all, sentenced to life in Florida.

Neither Magnus nor Alec knew any of this. For Alec’s money, it was further proof of Hell’s undoing at its own hands. Magnus would wager, again, that it was probably just general human incompetence. They were both right, in a way.

Alec thumped his head back against the headrest. “Seriously?”

“What else could have happened?” Alec didn’t have an answer to that. 

"Left alone, we have no idea what she is capable of. She could trigger the End at any moment." Magnus let out a sigh. "And even if she doesn't destroy the world right away, it's going to be my head on a plate. I don’t suppose your side would grant me asylum?” he asked lightly.

Alec snorted.

“Only if they wanted to kill us together.”

“How romantic.” Magnus drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. Out the window, the dark countryside flew by. “Alexander, this was my mistake. It’s entirely possible you could come out of this unscathed.”

Alec laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, right. I interfered. When the Apocalypse goes wrong and they can’t find the Antichrist, my superiors are going to come straight to me.”

“But I tempted you,” Magnus reminded him, eyes glinting with guilt.

Alex exhaled. Magnus didn’t know the half of it. “That’s even worse. Angels can’t just be… tempted by demons,” Alec said firmly, more to himself than to Magnus. “We have a duty to uphold.”

“What a shame.”

“Look,” said Alec irritably, ready to change the direction of the conversation, “isn’t there anything we can do? Couldn’t we just -- track her, or something? If she can change the world around her, shouldn’t we be able to sense _something_?”

“No. Her powers would cloak her existence from supernatural forces, occult or divine. That’s why it was so important to place her with the right family, in the right place. To control her and to keep track of her.”

Alec ran a hand over his face in frustration. “Great. That’s just great.”

“I might have… another option,” said Magnus slowly.

“Please, Magnus,” said Alec, annoyed, “tell me, how are we going to track the untrackable Antichrist when we could be just days away from the end of the world. Preferably without getting killed. I’d love to know.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t like a lot of things,” Alec snapped, and then scowled when Magnus shot him a self-satisfied grin. “What is it?”

“We could get a human to do it.”

“What? No.”

Magnus clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“Magnus, you can’t be serious.”

“We wouldn’t be able to sense her if she slapped one of us in the face, Alec,” said Magnus. “A human could.”

“Okay, and? We hire a private detective and say what -- ‘Hi, we’re just a couple of delusional supernatural entities trying to track the Antichrist’?”

Magnus hummed. Alec gawked.

“Do you really think --”

“Alexander, let me rephrase this: Do we have another choice?”

Alec sighed. He rolled the window down, letting warm night air flood the car. It was a beautiful summer night, and the Hudson Valley scenery rolled by. The grass had long turned yellow and some of the trees had begun the annual shift from green to orange to red. It was beautiful, but it was dry -- an inferno waiting to happen.

“How do you think it’s going to happen?” asked Alec softly.

“Frankly, I’m still hoping it doesn’t.” When that answer clearly didn’t appease Alec, Magnus shrugged. “Nuclear warfare is always popular.”

“Was that you?”

“Only if you ask my superiors,” said Magnus. He gazed out the window for a moment, as if he could see the blasts of bombs dancing in the night sky. “People are capable of an evil far beyond my wildest imagination.”

“And altruism far beyond mine,” admitted Alec.

Magnus shook his head. “Free will.”

“Must be nice.”

They filled the rest of the drive with theories on the end of the world -- whether it would be in fire, or in ice, whether it would be quick and easy or torturously long. Would the sun envelop the earth in a solar flare, and wipe everyone from the face of the planet? Would an asteroid crash into the earth and annihilate every living thing, and would anything new come from it? What were the odds of another biblical flood, something beautiful and divine, or would it simply be war, messy and violent and fundamentally human? Neither of them were sure. It was hard to imagine how, exactly, an eleven year old would rain death upon the earth.

* * *

 

Despite everything, Magnus slept well that night (even though Alec had declined his offer to come up to his apartment for _“a cup of coffee”_ ), swaddled in blankets on his luxurious bed despite the heat. In his own, much more humbly dressed bed, Alec slept well too (even though he sorely regretted not going up to Magnus’ apartment for _“a cup of coffee”_ \-- and Alec knew exactly what _that_ meant.) Iris Rouse, despite the disorientation from waking up on the floor of the office, and the confused interrogation of the police officers, slept well in her own little room in the back of the church -- after lighting her candles around the altar and doing her evening prayers, of course. Camille Belcourt slept well in a huge bed, bedroom floor littered with presents, though she did wonder why neither of her tutors had come to her party. And not far away, in a small town in upstate New York, Clary Fray rolled over in her bed, a puppy with a spotted ear curled to her chest, and dreamt of a beautiful world that shifted and shimmered around her, molded by her wishes like a ball of clay.

And all around the world, other forces began to wake.

 

**Thursday**

Clary rolled over in her bed. And then she rolled over again. And then again. She let out an emphatic sigh, replaying the events of the previous night in her head. She, Simon, and Maureen had spent the evening playing in the forest after her birthday party, spinning a fabulous tale about a group of knights setting out to slay a wicked dragon. By the time they had finally slayed the beast and freed its captive (a cute puppy with a wagging tail that trotted right up to Clary), it was well after Clary’s curfew. Her parents hadn’t been mad, per se, when she and her little band of knights came scampering out of the forest and into the backyard, but they had been worried and _disappointed_. And that was even worse.

Her dad hadn’t said anything about the puppy, strangely. Neither had her mom. They had just sent Clary, puppy and all, to bed. And now, here she was -- grounded.

Well, she wasn’t quite grounded, but Simon was, and Maureen had a dentist appointment. Clary herself had been told not to go wandering off alone, and she couldn’t exactly slay any dragons without her friends, so here she was. Bored. It was a very dangerous thing for an Antichrist to be.

She sat up abruptly, raking her eyes slowly over her room. It was a nice room. It was the only room she had ever had, and it kind of showed. It was cute, Clary thought as she looked at the pink curtains fluttering along with the breeze, but it was so… young. She was eleven now, and she needed a change.

So she made one. It wasn’t noticeable at first, just a few tweaks of color, a new chair for her desk, a little touch-up to the furniture that had gone a bit shabby with time and abuse. It was enough to lift her spirits. At the foot of her bed, Spot awoke from his slumber. He bounded across the bed and jumped into Clary’s lap, licking at her face as she laughed and cooed at him.

Finally, Clary pushed herself out of bed. She threw her hair up in a ponytail. Downstairs, she could hear her mom singing, probably making orange juice and breakfast like she always did during the summer. She padded across the room and sat herself before her favorite of the birthday gifts -- an easel from her mother, already bearing a fresh canvas. She gathered her paint and brushes, filled a cup with water from the bathroom sink, and then she began to paint.

Clary painted her own world, a beautiful world. It was the kind she wanted to live in, a world with excitement and adventure. One where she and her friends sailed around the ocean discovering lost islands, where mermaids laughed and splashed each other in warm waters. She painted aliens beaming cows up and leaving messages in corn fields. She painted fairies dancing in the wind and monsters that attacked cities and were driven away by mighty superheroes. She painted everything her overactive imagination could think of.

With each stroke of her paintbrush, the world shifted.

* * *

 

New York City, Magnus thought, might just last through the end of the world. No matter what happened, it was always business as usual.The hustle and bustle of the city never really changed, despite what was happening in the world around them -- and right now, there was a _lot_ happening in the world around them.

“I’ll be damned,” said Magnus, scrolling through the news on his phone with one hand and idly stirring his coffee with the other.

Alec looked up from his frittata, one eyebrow raised. “Aren’t you already?”

The two of them were sitting outside a popular brunch spot in the Village, the sun shining brightly through the gaps in the restaurant's awning. It was nearly the end of the world as they knew it, which made taking time for the small things -- namely, food and Alec’s wonderful (if surly) company -- all the more important. In a few days, one or both of them would probably be dead, and there would be no food left on the planet -- aside from stray rats and whatever edible fungi could be salvaged after a nuclear war. If any of New York City _did_ survive, the people left behind would probably be fine. The city had plenty of rats; Magnus had been sure of that.

Magnus set his phone down on the table, careful to avoid both of their plates, and slid it toward Alec. He plucked the mimosa straight from Alec’s hand. Alec stared down at the phone, perplexed; Magnus had a sleek and shiny iPhone, a model that wasn’t even technically available to the public yet, and Alec had a flip-phone he staunchly refused to trade for anything else. Magnus scrolled for him.

“‘The Lost City Rises -- Ancient Megacity Atlantis Resurfaces Off the Coast of Greece,’” Alec read aloud. His eyes darted up from the phone to Magnus. A crease formed between his eyebrows when he noticed the mimosa held loftily in Magnus’ hand, but he didn’t mention it. “You don’t think…?”

“These days, I try not to,” joked Magnus breezily, “but yes. I think it was her. And if she's capable of that, she's capable of anything.”

“We have to find her,” said Alec. The two of them had spent all morning trying to bang their heads together and come up with some kind of solution, but they were going nowhere. Magnus had combed through as many archaic books of prophecy he could find, and Alec had spent the morning in the  Middle East and North Africa, searching for artifacts or some kind of sign from the birthplace of Christianity itself, trying to find something that would help. All in all, Magnus had learned that the earth probably should have ended a couple hundred times already, and it was comforting to know that all of the people involved in those failures had been just as wildly incompetent as he was. Alec, in turn, had learned that pretty much everything of use had been excavated, pilfered, and either destroyed or spirited away to European museums (a number of which had been thoroughly bombed in World War II, rending the ‘conservation’ pointless) by white colonialists in the early 1900s.

Either way, brunch had been in order. In honor of all the hard work, Magnus had spirited Alec away to a restaurant  specifically for him, appropriately named _Extra Virgin_. Alec hadn’t been very amused; Magnus had offered to remedy the situation. Alec still hadn’t been very amused. The mimosas were pretty good, though.

Magnus picked his phone up again and began typing.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a P.I. or a fortune teller. I haven’t decided which.”

“Magnus…”

“I have spent all morning sorting through every single doomsday tome known to man trying to salvage _something_ to give me even a _hint_ about where she could be, Alexander. There is no ‘Finding the Antichrist for Dummies.’ There’s one book on this earth could help us, and no one has seen it in years. I understand you had a lovely vacation in Egypt and Israel--”

“--yeah, _lovely_ \--”

“-- but time is running out. We have to find someone who can help us.”

Alec worried his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment, and Magnus was momentarily caught by how beautiful he looked in the morning sun. For a moment, it almost felt like a normal morning, the two of them squabbling pointlessly over brunch without a care in the world. “Fine,” Alec acquiesced.

“Good, because I’ve already found just the place,” said Magnus, sliding his phone across the table again. “But first, you’re going to need a better suit.”

* * *

 

The _Sigblad_ was one of the most ridiculous things Alec had ever seen in his life -- and he had spent a rather unfortunate chunk of time in California during the 1970s (that chunk of time had been about three days, but it had been enough). It was a quadruple decker monster of a boat, the kind that looked more suited to flying through space than cruising around the Hudson. Even the lifeboats looked expensive.  They had yet to leave the harbor, and Alec was already filled with apprehension.

Caroline Connor of Pandemonium Enterprises didn’t seem to notice, though. She was, like so many others in New York City, a pant-suited automaton of a woman. Her red hair touched the shoulders of her perfectly-tailored navy suit in a manicured lob. Her skin was pale, her heels were tall, and she hadn’t stopped smiling since Alec and Magnus had stepped onto the boat -- Magnus with grace and poise, Alec without tripping too much.

“Magnus Bane,” she greeted, stretching out the vowels of Magnus’ cover name with a practiced cheerfulness. “It’s _so_ wonderful to have you and your fiancé here. You look _amazing_.” She had given Alec one look, the kind one might give a bug ground under her heel, before slapping on a fake smile for Magnus.

“Thank you for having us, Miss Connor,” said Magnus congenially. As always, he was dressed to kill. Alec was having a hard time keeping himself from staring at the way Magnus’ suit emphasized his broad shoulders and slim waist. He refused to let his eyes drift any lower than that. “Especially on such short notice.”

Caroline waved her hand, still smiling. Alec was glad he wore sunglasses, because the reflection of the midday sun off her eerily perfect teeth was nearly blinding. “Of _course_ , Magnus, dear. Please follow me -- we have business to discuss.”

They followed her. Alec shifted uncomfortably; the suit Magnus had conjured for him was sleek and immaculately tailored, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable. As with any situation in which Magnus had a say in Alec’s attire, he had deemed the rest of the angel’s wardrobe as “an affront to clothing itself”, and Alec had been given the option between wearing nothing at all or wearing something picked out by Magnus. Alec had gone with the latter, though Magnus had seemed oddly disappointed.

And now, they were waltzing around on one of the most expensive yachts in New York City, all in order to curry favor with a cult.

_(“I wouldn’t call them a cult,” said Magnus, looping a deep blue tie around Alec’s neck. “There’s a difference between occultists and cults. It’s more of a field of study than anything.”_

_Alec looked down at him skeptically. Magnus’ spacious Brooklyn flat had four bedrooms, and two of them were devoted to clothing. The entire apartment was the exact opposite of what Alec’s was; where Alec’s apartment was austere, pristine, and minimalistic, Magnus’ was cluttered, eccentric, and luxurious. It seemed to show every single one of his thousands of years on earth, and it was something of an antique collector’s wet dream. Certain items were highly coveted by museums across the world, but Magnus was a sentimental hoarder with no lack of money -- he wouldn’t budge, no matter the price._

_“They literally summoned you in a circle of blood in 2008,” deadpanned Alec._

_Magnus shrugged. “And a sloppy one, at that, but I couldn’t exactly not go,” he said. He slid the blue tie off of Alec’s neck in a lightning fast movement, and threw it over his shoulder somewhere. “People don’t go around practicing occult magic and summoning demons like they used to. It was a trip for business,” said Magnus, and then, with a suggestive lift of his eyebrow, “and pleasure.” And then he laughingly held up a crimson tie, claiming that it perfectly matched the color of Alec’s flushed cheeks.)_

Pandemonium Enterprises was a business front. Like so many other American corporations -- Hobby Lobby, Forever 21, Chik-Fil-A-- it was the kind of cult-backed multinational big business that met at the intersection of two core American values: exploitationist capitalist expansion and zealous religious fervor. While it seemed like a luxury entertainment management company for the cream of the New York City elite, it was mostly for the kind of people who wanted to spend over five hundred dollars on a bottle of wine and talk about reptilian overlord conspiracy theories. Ninety percent of what they practiced was bullshit.

Alec couldn’t tell if what they were doing was ironic, or sheer genius -- forcing wealthy businessmen to shell out thousands of dollars to dance naked in the freezing Catskills or to go slopping around in the sewer system in search of demons, monsters, and a supposed portal to Hell. Alec assumed it was a little bit of both.

He allowed Magnus to press a hand to the small of his back and guide him through the ship, following Caroline as she prattled about in front of them with that annoying inflection of hers, the irritating staccato of one well versed in customer service.

 _“Fiancé?_ ” hissed Alec.

“Of course, my dear,” said Magnus. “This is a couple’s cruise. And it _is_ legal, after all.”

“I know it’s legal,” snapped Alec. Regardless of what some might say, that had been one of his better works.

Caroline led them below deck. Alec looked around curiously, trying to focus on anything he could to distract himself from the weight of Magnus’ hand against his back. Everyone they passed looked surprisingly normal, if disgustingly rich.

The salon they entered was beautiful. Dressed opulently in dark wood and gold detailing, the room oozed money. Alec felt as though he had been thrown back in time, into some Victorian aristocrat’s study. The far end of the room was dominated by an unmanned bar of deep, rich wood set against a mirrored wall that added to the illusion of luxury. The walls were divided by tall windows, thick black curtains pulled back and anchored to the side to give a view of the Hudson. Interspersed between them were built-in bookshelves showcasing thick tomes with strange titles. A long table of black marble lined with golden candelabras stretched down the middle of the room, bordered to one side by a decadent black sofa and to the other by a handful of high-backed leather armchairs.  

“Why don’t we close these curtains,” suggested Caroline, still smiling. Alec was reminded of tourists who would flock to Buckingham Palace to perform silly, frightening, or downright lewd acts in order to garner some kind of reaction from the stony guards. Alec felt exactly that kind of pull toward Caroline; he wanted desperately to know what he could do to wipe that plasticine smile off her face. “Make it a little more… intimate.”

She took a few moments to pull the golden cords from their anchors on the wall, the room darkening slightly with each motion. By the time she had circled back to where Magnus and Alec stood, the room was bathed in darkness, illuminated only faintly by candlelight and the one remaining window. Caroline pulled the curtain, and it was as if night had settled around them. She turned around in the dim candlelight and smiled devilishly.

“Please,” she said, motioning toward the sofa, “have a seat.”

Alec was much more inclined to turn around and run the hell out of there, but he was steadied by the weight of Magnus’ hand at his back, and allowed himself to be guided further into the room. He felt a twinge of disappointment when Magnus’ warm hand fell away, and he watched as the demon dropped onto the sofa. Alec declined the invitation, and was rewarded with an eye-twitch from Caroline. Instead, he circled the room slowly, eyes drawn to the thin bookshelves separating the windows.

“I was quite surprised to receive your email this morning,” said Caroline pleasantly. “You made it very clear the last time we met that you had no desire to meet again.”

“I had no desire to be transported from my loft -- where I was quite happy with steak, vodka, and a roof over my head -- to a blood ritual in the middle of nowhere to do tricks for a bunch of unhinged Wall Street bankers,” corrected Magnus. “Not a single one of which, I might add, sold me his immortal soul.”

“And I’m very sorry about that,” Caroline apologized, manicured hands folded diplomatically in her lap. “I think you would have _much_ better luck with this new group. In fact, there’s a retreat in Utah next month, and we’d _love_ to have you as a guest of honor.”

Alec snorted, earning him a contemptuous glare. If they didn’t get what they needed -- _soon_ \-- there wouldn’t even be a next month.

Caroline was still smiling, but she was gazing at Alec with a new glint in her eye, as if she had just seen him for the first time. She leaned forward a bit, red hair falling almost dangerously close to the flickering flame of a candle. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name earlier -- what was it again?”

“Alec,” Alec said flatly. It was technically a lie, but it didn’t really matter. His tally was already getting dangerously high -- what was one more?

“Alec,” the woman repeated. “And… what, exactly, did you say your relationship to Magnus was?”

“Pay my handsome, _mortal_ lover no mind,” said Magnus quickly, dispelling the conversation with a wave of his arm. Warmth crawled up Alec’s neck. “You may also recall, my dear, that I said something else at the end of our last meeting.”

Ah, there it was. The woman’s smile had begun to falter. “Did you?”

“I believe I did,” said Magnus. He reclined backwards casually, one arm extended across the back of the sofa. He suddenly seemed taller, his eyes sharper. He looked powerful. “I recall telling you that my presence came with a price -- not even the devil has all the time in the world. I don’t like mine being wasted.” He paused. “And I’m not all that fond of pine trees or sheep guts, either.”

Caroline’s smile had begun to slip even further, Alec noticed with a mean sense of satisfaction. Behind the put-together facade, fear had begun to dance behind her eyes. “Name it,” she said as casually as she could muster.

Magnus let that hang heavily in the air for a moment. Alec turned back to inspect the bookshelves, mostly so that Caroline wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. _Smoke and mirrors,_ he thought, remembering the previous day’s conversation.

“I need you to track someone for me,” said Magnus finally. “A girl.”

“A girl?” Caroline’s eyes shot rapidly between Magnus and Alec. “But, I thought --”

“Not like that,” Magnus corrected hastily. “A… friend of mine has a daughter, who has recently gone missing, and due to the… nature of the child, we’ve had a difficult time finding her. It would be best to leave the search in the care of humans.”

Caroline nodded, slowly, and seemed to relax; her fingers unclenched from where they had nearly punctured the upholstery of her armchair. “Of course. I can do that.”

“It may be dangerous,” Magnus warned. “And no one else can know.”

“Of course not,” said Caroline solemnly. “What is the girl’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

The woman frowned.

“Where is her origin of birth?”

“That’s also a bit difficult to say.”

“And you wouldn’t have a lock of hair?”

“Definitely not.”

The two continued on like that for a few more minutes, attempting to exhaust every means of tracking. Alec ran a finger through the film of dust on one of the bookshelves. He didn’t think much of the place, really; despite her enthusiastic exterior, he didn’t find Caroline Connor to be the most competent of people, and the entire business seemed like a thinly veiled excuse for rich people to luxuriate in their wealth and throw deviant sexual parties. All around them, the world was being changed; the lost city of Atlantis had risen, and there were reports of UFOs sweeping en masse through the sky over the Midwest. They were wasting time.

Alec went to wipe the dust off onto one of the books’ spines (he didn’t doubt that Magnus would murder him if he left so much as a fingerprint on the fine suit) and froze.

It was a small book, much shorter than the others that lined the shelves. Whereas the rest were grandiose leather tomes with names such as _The Sixty-Nine Forbidden Secrets_ and _IN FINE DIERUM_ and _Blood Magick for Dummies_ , this one was a squat, fat book with a battered, papery spine. _Madame Dorothea’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies_. Alec’s heart began to pound.

He shot a glance over his shoulder. Magnus had retired from taunting the poor woman, and the two of them were now angling their necks over the table in consternation, glaring at a pad of paper that was divided into two columns, “WHAT WE KNOW” and “WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW”. The “WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW” column was devastatingly long.

Alec licked his lips and turned back to the shelf. Slowly, he eased the book out from between _An Illustrated History of Sexual Rituals_ and _101 Uses for Goat’s Blood_. He flipped to the first page carefully. The pages were old and fragile. Alec worried that one wrong move would scatter them across the floor.

“MADAME DOROTHEA’S NICE AND ACCURATE PROPHECIES,” declared the first page, and then in smaller print, “The First, Last, and ONLY Fully Accurate Account of the End of the World as We Know It.”

Alec frowned. In the background, Magnus and Caroline were arguing about something. He carefully turned the page, hoping that there would be something useful -- something like, “Once upon a time, an angel and a demon managed to ruin thousands of years of divine planning and lost the Antichrist,” followed by everything they needed to know about the Antichrist, including her name, birthdate, and blood type -- the last of which was actually what Magnus and Caroline were arguing about at that very moment.

Instead, the book was filled with gibberish. Alec knew every single language ever spoken on the planet Earth, and then some. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the garbled words of nonsense to make sense. Alec couldn’t understand it. Objectively, the text _looked_ like English -- albeit a very old, archaic form -- but Alec couldn’t put any of it together; he understood the words individually, but they made absolutely no sense when smashed together. They were the ramblings of a madwoman.

And yet…

Alec couldn’t quite explain why he did what he did next. He looked over his shoulder. Magnus and the woman were performing some kind of blood pact. They had both sliced their hands open and were shaking them over the candlelight. Alec frowned in disgust. The woman was lucky that demons were incapable of carrying diseases, because all of this blood magic was, frankly, unsanitary.

While they were preoccupied, Alec shoved the book into the pocket of his suit -- which had, miraculously, expanded. Guiltily, and before he could make himself put it back, Alec whirled around and made his way to the couch.

“I believe that settles your debt,” said Magnus finally. He snapped his finger and his hand was free of blood, no evidence that it had been injured left behind. He seemed to consider something for a moment and then he sighed and snapped his fingers again, leaving Caroline’s hand clean and unblemished as well. “In exchange for your services -- if the girl is found -- and five years of your life, you will be forgiven. And I highly suggest you put yourself as far as possible from the next demon summoning,” suggested Magnus, feigning nonchalance. “Not all of my kind are as generous as I am.”

Caroline nodded emphatically. Alec got the sense that she really didn’t care. “Of course. I’ll get my best occultist on it immediately -- she has an _amazing_ affinity for this kind of thing. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Wonderful. Come on, _dear_ ,” said Magnus cheerfully, holding an arm out to Alec. Alec rolled his eyes and tucked his hand into the crook of Magnus’ elbow. Magnus’ eyes widened, and then his surprise gave way to a soft smile.  “I believe we might as well take in the view while we can.”

Caroline escorted them to the main deck. Alec squinted at the sudden brightness, watching the couples that lounged on the deck, laughing and dancing and taking in the view of the Hudson. It really was a couple’s cruise, after all. Alec allowed himself to be led further away from the clusters of tables at the main deck, and off toward a more private spot on the side of the yacht.

“I’m going to drag you to a church after this is all over to make up for all of this... Satanism,” said Alec offhandedly. He drummed his fingers against the railing, and glanced out toward the city.The air was pleasantly cool against his face. He could hear the familiar squawking of the seagulls that tormented the seafront, always brazenly hurtling down like dive-bombers to snatch away bags of chips or otherwise harass city goers.

“I’d be delighted to walk down a church with you, my dear fiancé,” teased Magnus.

Alec rolled his eyes. “Did you really take five years of that woman’s life?”

“Yes,” sighed Magnus, fiddling with the silver cuff on his ear. He leaned over the railing, and Alec followed his gaze to where the _Sigblad_ treaded the dark waters. “She’s going to get a promotion sometime in the next few days that she can’t refuse, in Iowa, of all places. She’ll be stuck there for five years, and hating every moment of it.”

Alec stifled a smile.

“Don’t look so pleased, angel. That one’s already on the fast-track toward my side.”

“So what did she say about the girl?”

“We’re going to try to track her using the location and approximate time of her birth,” said Magnus, “but there were two other babies in that church as well, and we can’t be sure of the exact time of birth. We have to know soon, or it will be a lost cause, but…” Magnus shrugged. His hands rested loosely on the railing, so close to Alec’s.  “It’s all we’ve got.”

The book burned against Alec’s thigh like a brand, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t know how to explain it. Stealing the book had been an impulsive action, and it was probably useless anyway. In any case, he didn’t want to admit to Magnus, of all people, that he had just stolen something. He would never live it down.

“I guess it is,” said Alec. They had been in the main salon for a long time, and the sun had shifted in the sky. It was still warm, a beautiful summer’s day, but it was beginning to cool, and Alec closed his eyes, letting himself soak in the feeling of sun on his skin, wind blowing through his hair. Quiet music drifted from the main lounging area through -- Elton John, not what he expected from a cult.

When Alec opened his eyes, it was to find Magnus studying him. His elbow was on the railing and his head was in his hand, eyes full of something Alec was too scared to name. It made his heart pound in his chest.

“What?” asked Alec, his voice coming out a lot softer than he intended.

“Nothing,” said Magnus quietly. He shifted and then smiled, eyes lighting up brightly, as if the world wasn’t literally falling to pieces around them. “I have an idea.Why don’t you and I head up to the observation deck and have some of that wine and lobster we paid for?”

“Magnus, the world is literally about to end --”

“-- and the world will still be about to end regardless of what we do tonight. We might as well make the best of it while we can.” Magnus pressed his fingertips against the back of Alec’s hand gently, smoothing out the tension where Alec’s white-knuckled fingers clutched at the railing.

Alec traced the curve of Magnus’ smile with his eyes and couldn’t find a single reason to say no.

**Friday**

“Wow, Clary,” said Simon, eyebrows raised. “You get better and better every day.”

Clary kicked her socked feet back and forth over the edge of her bed and followed his line of sight as it dragged along her bedroom walls. Other than taking Spot out for a few walks, she hadn’t left her room much the day before. Her mom had been a bit worried, until Clary had shown her the fruits of her labors. Her walls were practically wallpapered with paintings and drawings done from the day before, whipped up in an artistic frenzy. She had run out of canvas pretty quickly, and had resorted to tearing pages out of her sketchbook. Clary eyed the painting that Simon was looking at -- seven trumpeting angels - and hummed in thought. She was proud of what she had done, but it could be better. There was always room for improvement, after all.  

Maureen leaned close to Simon, squinting at the painting. Her eyes shifted to the one next to it, and she tapped at it with her finger. “Who’s this lady?” she asked, pointing to a painting of a woman with flowing hair seated on a crimson horse. The woman wore a suit of blood-red armor, and in one hand she hefted a large sword, extended up toward the heavens.

Clary shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

The woman had a name. In fact, she had many names; she had been on earth for a long time, and those years had rarely been idle. She had ridden alongside Alexander the Great when he had ripped through Asia and Africa. She was the one who had split China into three kingdoms, leaving a blood red trail of suffering in her wake. When the Goths had overwhelmed the Romans at Adrianople, when the Scots had brought down Stirling Castle, when the blitz of bombs had lit the nighttime sky over London, she had been there.

Her name was War, and she looked great for her age. She looked quite young, in fact, as she wandered down the streets of Chicago like a lost child just looking for trouble.

She didn’t need to look for trouble. She was trouble. She blew a bubble with her gum and popped it, listening to the sound of a spray of bullets as a car drove by. Her mouth curved into a slow, dangerous smile, the kind of smile she had started wars with.

She didn’t need to start a war this time, though. One was already brewing from above and below, a Great War like none that had come before and none that would come again.

* * *

 

Magnus was moping.

For all intents and purposes, the end of the world was not the time to mope. There were plenty of other things Magnus should be doing. He _should_ be trying to track down the Antichrist, but that was a little out of his hands at the moment. All he could really do was sit back and wait for a call from Pandemonium Enterprises. Caroline had sent him a few emails, but most of them were simply advertisements for various “retreats” that she would love for him to make an appearance at. He _could_ empty out his savings and try to find some nice little doomsday bunker to hole up in for the foreseeable future, but that was pretty pointless as well. Doomsday prepping was one of the most human things Magnus had ever encountered. The idea that a hole in the ground and some crank-and-power technology could outsmart the _literal apocalypse_ was exactly the type of human arrogance and idealism that Magnus had come to love over the years.

Magnus honestly wasn’t sure he wanted to live in that world, anyway -- demons didn’t exactly need to do things like eat, sleep, or go on extravagant shopping sprees along Fifth Avenue, but what could Magnus say? He had grown accustomed to living a certain lifestyle. A world without Ethopian food, Taki’s Diner, or double martinis simply wasn’t worth living in.

So no, Magnus was not trying to find the Antichrist, and he wasn’t about to start indexing the various edible roots and fungi to subsist on after a nuclear war. It was midday and he hadn’t left his loft at all. He had cleaned the entire apartment, and then he had rearranged it. He couldn’t watch more than five minutes of television before turning the set off -- partially because nothing was interesting, and partially because Hell had a nasty habit of interrupting his favorite TV shows to communicate, and he didn’t really want a Prince of Hell to take over one of the million sex scenes on _Game of Thrones_ to tell him, in excruciating detail, exactly _how_ he was going to be tortured for losing the Antichrist.

(DVR had been Alec’s invention -- he had either taken pity on Magnus, or he had just found Magnus’ constant whining about losing entire plotlines to infernal intervention annoying. Either way, he had shown up to the loft one day and, red-faced, shoved a DVR box into Magnus’ hands. Magnus had been touched.

Netflix was all humanity, though.)

And now, Magnus was sitting on his balcony sipping a martini at eleven in the morning and feeling sorry for himself. He could practically hear Alec scolding him in the back of his head, but it was happy hour somewhere, and besides -- Magnus was a demon. Petty vices were part of the job description.

Far down below, Brooklyn continued in its usual, dizzyingly busy patterns. Magnus traced a finger around the rim of his Martini glass. At least some things never changed.

Magnus was moping because of Alec.

Despite Alec’s general reluctance to do anything fun, the two of them had enjoyed an excellent cruise around the Hudson the night before, eating lobster, drinking wine, and squabbling over petty arguments. It had felt nice. It was exactly how the two of them had spent thousands of years before, and Magnus had realized it was exactly how he wanted to spend the next thousands of years as well. The view had been beautiful, the lobster had been incredible, and the music had been terrific, even though Alec had steadfastly refused to dance (not even on the head of a pin).. And then the two of them had gone their separate ways, and Alec had bolted out of the car and into his building as fast as humanly possible (as fast as _angelically_ possible probably would have ruptured the already very thin fabric of the universe) and he hadn’t called Magnus back all day.

He hadn’t even texted.

Magnus gnawed the olive off of the toothpick thoughtfully, then tossed the toothpick over the railing of the balcony with no disregard for who or what it might hit. It was a petty act of evil that had simply become habit at this point. Every bit helped, after all.

Magnus wasn’t delusional. He knew that despite all of their camaraderie, despite the shared drinks over lobster, despite the torturous, neverending flirting, he and Alec were still enemies. They were on two sides of a war, and there was a gap between them that could never be crossed. Objectively, Magnus knew that the Alec he argued with over brunch wasn’t even close to Alec’s true form. His true form was likely a genderless beam of light that would burn Magnus’ demonic eyes straight out of his head if he so much as looked at it, or a multi headed beast that spoke in tongues, or a bouncing stack of non-Euclidean angles towering higher than the tallest summit on earth. Something beautiful and terrifying and practically incomprehensible, rather than a cute little angel with fluffy wings and a gleaming halo and rosy cheeks. Something burning with righteous fury that smote evil down on sight.

But none of that mattered, because _his_ Alec was a six-foot-something cynical jerk with a lopsided smile that made Magnus’ heart pound like a little girl’s and an ass tight enough to bounce quarters off of.

Magnus snapped his fingers, refilling the martini instantly. It had been easy enough when he had just wanted to sleep with the guy. Magnus had spent the first millennium on earth popping up in inappropriate places and attempting to entice Alec into doing inappropriate things. That had never exactly gone his way, unfortunately. Beyond personal pleasure, Magnus was certain that tempting an angel would earn him a fabulous commendation.

Somewhere around the second millennium, however, Magnus had been dismayed to find he liked the angel. An angel, of all things. The ultimate enemy. But Alec didn’t feel like an enemy. In fact, Magnus would hazard that Alec might be the closest thing he had to a friend, his eternal companion to endure the ever-changing tide of life on Earth with. It wasn’t a big thing at first. The two simply spent a lot of time together, far more time than Magnus had ever spent around his own comrades, and thousands of years thrown together on earth had proven that the two had far more in common with one another than they possibly could with any of their superiors.

Alec was that he was a good guy -- but that was it. Not a great one. Not an amazing one. Not a wholly selfless, wholly holy kind of guy. They would both deny it vehemently, Magnus knew, but deep down, Alec could be a bit of an asshole and Magnus had a bit of a golden heart. Alec had little patience and could sometimes snap when frustration got the best of him. He had a keen sense of schadenfreude that he extended toward those he disliked -- which was pretty much everyone. And behind Magnus’ rough, philandering exterior, deep past the curses and temptations expected of a demon, he had something of a soft heart. He healed the occasional sick child polluting the New York streets with a hacking, mucus-laden cough. He occasionally let sweet old ladies or half-dead looking college students cut in line at Starbucks. The longer the two were stationed on earth, the better they got along, and Magnus had a sneaking suspicion it was because the centuries on earth had transformed them from a righteous warrior of heaven and a debauched, spiteful minion of hell to simply two people trying to hammer in the hours for a nine-to-five job. Perform a miracle here, blight something there, and clock out just in time to kick back and enjoy what life on earth had to offer.

It wasn’t like work wasn’t getting done. Sure, the two were working on opposite sides, attempting to shift the ever-changing cosmic balance between Good and Evil, but -- and this was the most important part, in Magnus’ opinion -- the worst atrocities and the greatest kindnesses on earth were committed by humans, free of any heavenly or hellish influence. Magnus himself sure wasn’t creative enough to come up with half of the horrors they subjected one another to, and Alec was too consumed by righteous fury to comprehend the altruism displayed by many humans. The Spanish Inquisition, capitalism, acid wash jeans… sure, Magnus may have claimed responsibility for those (and earned quite a few commendations, he might add), but even he couldn’t dream up such horrors. Free will, and all that.

And so the cosmic scale continued to balance itself, with or without the help of Magnus or Alec, and Magnus was left to nurse his ridiculous crush in peace. Which was exactly what he was trying to do now, sipping martinis on his balcony, because no matter what he did, Alec refused to call him back.

* * *

 

“How can you not know?” asked Simon curiously. He flopped backward onto Clary’s bed. Maureen followed, sitting down awfully close to him.

“I dunno,” Clary said. “I just drew her.”

“She’s kinda scary, don’t you think?” asked Maureen.

Clary pursed her lips, studying the painting. Maybe the red knight was scary, but there was something all very familiar about her. Clary couldn’t put into words, so she had put it into a painting. There was something about the woman that was quite familiar, something frightening but sometimes beautiful and that, most importantly, felt rooted deep within Clary herself.

“I guess,” said Clary, slowly.

“Hey, you did another one.”

Clary nodded, running running her fingers over the quilt on her bed. “I painted three.”

Simon hummed in thought. He pushed himself off the bed, and Maureen immediately followed this time too, Clary noted, as if pulled by a magnet.

The second one wore black, seated atop a magnificent black steed. His dark armor gleamed. He hoisted a pair of silver scales with one hand, and stared out of the page with dark, cold eyes. His face was gaunt, like skin wrapped around a skull.

Clary didn’t have a name for him, either, but he had been on earth just as long as his sister. He was a good deal handsomer than Clary’s rendition, though. One might mistakenly say he had the face of an angel, but that wasn’t quite right. He had smooth brown skin, large eyes, and dark hair that was slicked back. He was eating pretty well these days. He couldn’t say the same about everyone else

He ran a business these days. In fact, he ran a few. He was currently sitting in a high-rise in London, watching a very boring business meeting unfold, one that would have a significant outcome. A massive transnational corporation was gobbling up swathes of land in India, pushing out local farmers and hiking the prices of food up higher and higher. Famine smiled into his hand. Technology may change, food may be more readily available than ever, but the hunger for money never subsided.

It didn’t matter, though. He stood and smiled as the meeting came to a close, shaking a businessman’s meaty hand with a polite small. Soon, it would all be gone. No amount of money could stop the end of the world.

* * *

 

Alec had seven missed calls on his phone -- not that he was aware. He hadn’t slept at all. He didn’t really need to, but he got grouchy without it. He was still wearing the beautifully tailored suit Magnus had found for him, but it was now mussed and rumpled beyond compare. If he didn’t die in the impending Apocalypse, Magnus would probably murder him for his negligence. And for ignoring his calls, but, again -- Alec wasn’t yet aware of that.

The night with Magnus on the yacht had been fun. It had been exactly what Alec needed to get his mind off of the whole End of the World thing, and every now and then when he got particularly frustrated, he would allow his eyes to glaze over and he would space out and just think about the previous night -- about how nice Magnus had looked against the pink sunset, or about his full laugh when he had offered Alec a bite of his lobster, only to have Alec literally pull the meat off the fork with his fingers. And then Alec’s mind would drift, and he would imagine what would have happened if he had accepted Magnus’ offer for a dance, or if he hadn’t been in such a rush to get back to his apartment, or if he had _finally_ accepted Magnus’ offer of _“a cup of coffee”_ after a couple hundred years.

Instead, Alec had spent hours poring over the most cryptic book he had ever encountered in his life.

The book had some kind of pull. Alec couldn’t explain it. It seemed to pulse with an energy, but Alec didn’t know what kind. It was good-natured, and it was supernatural, but it wasn’t divine. It was mysterious, and in some ways it was dark, but it wasn’t infernal. If Alec was capable of divorcing himself from the self-righteous arrogance of an angel, he would have realized that it pulsed with an energy that was  entirely human.

He had spent the previous night stooped over the book, comparing it side-by-side with the Bible. When that didn’t make any sense, he had pulled out an earlier edition of the bible. And then a different language. And then the original Hebrew.

When the Lord’s book told him nothing, Alec had gone to the whirring, ancient computer in the corner of his loft that Magnus referred to only as “an infernal contraption and an affront to mankind -- one of my better works.” It was probably the oldest computer on earth. Alec had spent a few good minutes hitting at it, because the only way he really knew how to handle technology was to beat it into submission, until finally he had managed to pull up a painfully slow-loading window of Internet Explorer (also one of Magnus’ better works) and got to work.

It was slow going. Alec wasn’t good with computers. He typed like someone’s aging grandfather, employing a hunt-and-peck method that could stretch one simple search into a minute long-endeavor. Every now and then the page would randomly freeze, and he had to coax it back into working with a ritual that started with praying to God and ended with physical violence.

He had found nothing on _MADAME DOROTHEA’S NICE AND ACCURATE PROPHECIES_ on his first google search, though he did find some strange fetish sites. After the first hour of searching, Alec had decided that the internet was a cesspool. Magnus was right -- there was no greater danger to humans than their own ingenuity. Sometime during the second hour, he found the first mention of the book deep in some tinhatting forum from 1998.

Another few hours, sixty-six open tabs, and three major browser crashes later, Alec thought he might have stumbled onto something.

The book, Alec had gleaned from an ancient geocities blog dedicated to doomsday prophecies and radical feminism, had been written by one Madame Dorothea Rollins, and was allegedly the only completely accurate prophecy book known to mankind. Nostradamus, William Miller, Jim Jones -- although they all enjoyed far more success, none of them held a candle to Madame Dorothea. Allegedly. Alec wasn’t sure. It was pretty hard to take anything seriously when half of the page was dedicated to glittery, rotating Venus symbols and enormous, pixelated images of Doomsday “evidence”, but Alec still found himself nodding along to some of what was said, even if it was in a nearly unreadable font. It was quite sad, Alec thought, that the gender divide extended even toward Doomsday prophets.

The book was very rare. Despite its accuracy (or maybe because of it), it had been completely forgotten in the annals of history. The few copies made had been destroyed or used for more practical purposes, such as kindling or toilet paper. Madame Dorothea herself had been accused of being a witch and burned at the stake. She had complicated matters by bundling gunpowder into the gowns of her skirt, and had subsequently taken all of her accusers down with her in a furious blaze that wiped out half the town.

The book was notoriously difficult to decipher. It wasn’t because it was in code, Alec realized, but simply because the only way one could really follow it was to be a sixty five year old, somewhat senile witch alternating between chasing around grandchildren and writing doomsday prophecies when she was gripped by a particularly powerful vision. She had the kind of superior intelligence possessed by a very small number of human beings. Alec personally believed that number was zero, because Alec had yet to meet a human who hadn’t been too dangerously stupid for their own good, and the more he read about Madame Dorothea, the more firmly he held to that belief. Still, the woman clearly knew what she was talking about, even if the predictions were so accurate as to be almost useless.

Alec ran a hand through his already messy hair, and drummed his fingers against the desk. His eyes darted between the book and the computer. Finally, he pulled a bright yellow legal pad out of the desk drawer, bundled the prophecy book and a Bible into his hand, and then settled onto the couch to try and make sense of it.

He had deciphered a few pages when he saw his phone flash out of the corner of his eye. He chewed absently on the cap of his pen. He knew he should tell Magnus, if only for selfish, practical reasons. Magnus had always been devilishly clever, and he was good at understanding people. As an angel, it shamed Alec to say it, but Magnus had an acute sense of empathy that Alec had never possessed. Empathy for the devil, maybe? It was what made Magnus so good at his job -- he was able to understand humans, to understand their wants and their needs, and to exploit them.

Alec frowned around the cap of his pen, and then, when he realized what he had been doing, he pulled the pen away and glared at the warped cap in disgust. That wasn’t quite right. If empathy made Magnus terrible, made him lure out the weaknesses in people and tempt them toward sin, it also made him great; he was kind to the wretched and the poor. He was kind to those who had suffered. He understood the tormentor and the tormented. He may not aim to save their souls, may occasionally nudge them down a darker path, but in all honesty, he had little desire to torture humans. They did enough of that themselves, he said.

A wave of guilt crested over Alec. He knew he should tell Magnus.

He also knew he shouldn’t tell Magnus.

The last couple centuries had been so… comfortable. Alec didn’t really have any other way of describing it. The first few millennia on earth had been hard work; Alec had been too busy trying to stop humans from beating each other to death with rocks and gently guide them into establishing civilization to really stop and think for himself. It was generally discouraged -- free will was a luxury afforded only to humans. But after a while, Alec had spent long enough surrounded by them, and what could he say? They had rubbed off a bit, and so had Magnus. While the first millennia were spent chasing away the annoying demon with a crucifix or spraying at him with holy water like an owner trying to train a cat, curiosity had eventually got the best of him. And then it happened again. And again. And before Alec knew what he was doing, he was having regular brunches and drinks and vacations with the enemy. It wasn’t normal, it wasn’t right, but… it sure was fun.

But now wasn’t the time for comfort, and now wasn’t time for fraternizing with the enemy. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this -- how much he could play this game with Magnus, dancing with the devil and hoping not to get burnt, before it all came crashing down around them. Until someone above or someone below caught word about it, and then everything went to Hell in a handbasket -- not that everything wasn’t already going to Hell in a handbasket. Or Heaven. Alec was technically supposed to root for Heaven, but he didn’t particularly like either option, if he was honest.

Alec scribbled something down from the book of Revelations. His yellow legal pad was rapidly beginning to look like the notebook of a serial killer.

He sighed. He had to tell Magnus. He absolutely could not tell Magnus. The two thoughts chased each other around in his head. His phone started ringing again. It vibrated itself over the edge of the coffee table.

Alec scrubbed at his face, at a loss. It was hard work to trust a demon.

* * *

 

Maureen’s stomach grumbled loudly. Clary and Simon both shot their heads to look at her, and Simon let out a loud laugh.

“I’m hungry,” muttered Maureen.

Clary smiled and pushed herself up off her bed. She scooped Spot up from where he sat on the floor, and he curled up against her chest immediately. “C’mon,” said Clary, motioning toward the door. “I think we still have some cake left from my birthday.”

The two girls were half out the door when Simon called, “Wait! Clary!”

Clary poked her head back in. “Yes?”

“What about the third one?”

Clary scanned her bedroom, and then pointed to one of the paintings thumbtacked to the wall above her desk. He was almost beautiful, if still a bit frightening. His horse and his armor were a brilliant bright white. Unlike the others, his hands were empty, but a crown sat perched atop his brow.

“No name?”

“Nope,” said Clary. “Let’s go get cake.”

The third one had just as many names as the others. Mostly because he had been replaced on the job. He had been Pestilence and Plague for most of recorded history, sweeping across the earth and devastating its populations en masse. That had only lasted so long. Unlike Famine, he hadn’t quite been able to make it through the twentieth century. When people had started regularly washing their hands, things had gone downhill for Pestilence. The inventions of penicillin and vaccines had rendered him practically useless, and he had hung his head and relinquished the crown to a much younger replacement.

Pollution hadn’t been around for long, but he was pretty good at his job. He stared out at the South China Sea from a helicopter, angling a news camera down to hone in on the spot where thousands of tons of oil were leaking from an oil rig after a collision with a ship. The blue sea was mottled by a path of brown oil. In some spots, it glittered incandescently under the morning sun, but it was mostly an ugly blight that leaked through the waters like blood from a wound. It was almost as if a single match could light the ocean on fire.

Pollution ran a hand through his blonde hair knowing that, in a matter of days, it would all be up in flames anyway.

* * *

 

Clary didn’t draw the last one. She didn’t have to. He had been there long before the other three, and would be there long after they had gone. He had witnessed the dawning of the world, and would see it through to the end, far beyond the silly Great War that played about all around him. He was in the bullet riddled streets of Chicago, and he walked among the starving in India. He sank deep into the sullied waters of the South China Sea and drifted inland, slowly choking the life out of every living thing he passed. He had passed through Fairmond on his pale horse quite often, traversing the back roads and dirt paths that Clary and her friends zipped across on their bikes. He had brushed past the squabbling angel and demon countless times over the thousands of years they had spent on earth.

His name was Death, and he would outlast them all.

Saturday

Clary’s dreams had been strange, filled with visions of the stars raining down from the night sky, and earthquakes shattering the earth. She dreamt of mountains moving and shifting, and a black sun that beat down cruelly over the earth like an angered God. She saw four horsemen galloping through the wreckage of humankind, each one more terrible than the last. She heard the sound of the angel’s trumpet, and witnessed rivers running dry. A war greater than any other waged all around, and Clary herself stood at the center of it.

The dream was vivid, but it didn’t scare Clary. As soon as she woke up, she knew what she had to do.

**Saturday**

Magnus was drinking his morning coffee and watching the news when he got the call.

It was not, unfortunately, the call he wanted. Or the call he needed.

He sat at the breakfast bar, shoveling forkfuls of Belgian waffle into his mouth between sips of coffee. He was wearing a black robe and underwear. His hair was a mess. It had to be the end of the world, because it was a Saturday morning and he had woken up in his own bed before ten in the morning.

He licked whipped cream from the tines of his fork thoughtfully. For the first time since the advent of the 24 hour news cycle (a more successful work of his), he was able to take the news seriously. The recent alterations to reality had done a good job of that; most news anchors and pundits were too stunned and confused to really twist it to their agendas already, but Magnus gave them a week, at most. If the world hadn’t ended in a fiery inferno by that point, of course. As it was, it was pretty difficult to politicize Atlantis rising off the coast Greece, or little green men in spaceships beaming down onto American highways to interrogate terrified drivers about the whereabouts of the closest McDonald’s. Environmental activists had been pretty excited about the mermaids, though, even if a few of them had a nasty habit of dragging reporters down into the shadowy waters.

The end of the world apparently didn’t outweigh celebrity entertainment news in terms of importance, though, because after ten minutes spent talking about a Lovecraftian monster that had apparently taken up residence in a city block of Los Angeles, the highly-botoxed, nigh expressionless news anchor began gushing about a groundbreaking piece of Kardashian news. The camera cut to an all-access interview with three of the sisters, and Magnus pushed the remains of the Belgian waffle around with his fork as one of them began dishing about some kind of feud with Taylor Swift. This was exactly what Magnus meant when he said that humans tortured themselves beyond anything he could ever dream up. He idly wondered if he could request a commendation for the Kardashians. He hadn’t spent six thousand years dreaming up inconveniences for humankind, only to have them outdo him through reality television.

“MAGNUS,” said Kim Kardashian cooly, and Magnus dropped his fork. _“WE NEED TO TALK.”_

Kim Kardashian looked him up and down, her sisters frozen in motion at her side. Magnus slowly pushed the plate of waffles out of her line of vision, and self-consciously pulled his robe closer around his chest. “Yes?”

_“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, MAGNUS?”_

Presently, he was wishing he had gone with his gut and made a mimosa in lieu of coffee. He supposed it served him _right for trying to live virtuously._

 _Kim didn’t seem to want_ an answer. _“WE HAVE THE GIRL, MAGNUS,”_ She continued on, booming in a deep voice that reverberated around the loft. Magnus worried for the tablet’s speakers. He briefly wondered if he should dock the thing into an iHome, but that would probably be rude to do mid-conversation. Besides, he didn’t want his neighbors to have to hear, in extreme, gruesome detail, just how the forces of Hell planned to torture him. Not for the first time, he found himself hoping that Heaven would win. At least then it would be quick and painless, right? Divine Mercy, and all that.

_“SHE KNOWS NOTHING. SHE DOES NOT HAVE THE DOG. WE HAVE AMASSED THE ARMIES OF HELL, AND BROUGHT THE GIRL TO MEGIDDO, AND SHE KNOWS NOTHING OF THE GREAT WAR. THIS IS NOT OUR MASTER’S DAUGHTER, MAGNUS.”_

Personally, Magnus thought that most American politicians were probably on par with Satan himself, but he refrained from saying that. He refrained from saying anything at all, except for, quietly, “Oh.”

“ _OH? OH? IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY? THE ARMIES OF HELL AND HEAVEN ARE ASSEMBLING, MAGNUS. THE FOUR BEASTS HAVE BEGUN TO RIDE, BUT WE KNOW NOT WHERE TO. OUR ACOLYTES ON EARTH TELL US THEY HAVE BEEN APPROACHED BY YOU AND THAT... ANGEL,”_ Kim Kardashian spat the word with the kind of disgust she might normally reserve for a knockoff handbag, _“TO TRACK THE GIRL. WHERE IS SHE?”_

“Um,” was all Magnus could say. He felt as though he had been doused in ice water. His mind flashed to Pandemonium Enterprises -- he wondered what, exactly, Caroline Conner had been offered to sell him out. Or tortured with. Either way, it was probably a one way ticket to Hell. Maybe a guest appearance at the end of the world.

_“UM? UM? SOMETHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY WRONG, MAGNUS. AND WE TRUST THAT THERE IS A PERFECTLY REASONABLE EXPLANATION FOR THIS.”_

“It’s a very funny story,” offered Magnus.

_“I SHOULD HOPE SO, MAGNUS. YOU WILL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO TELL US ABOUT YOUR ‘FUNNY STORY’... IN FACT, YOU WILL HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD TO EXPLAIN. AND WE WILL LISTEN WITH GREAT INTEREST, MAGNUS. AND YOUR EXPLANATION WILL BE A SOURCE OF PLEASURE AND ENTERTAINMENT FOR ALL THE TORMENTED OF HELL, MAGNUS --”_

Magnus turned the iPad off.

The iPad flicked on again.

_“--BECAUSE NO MATTER THE EXTREME AGONY THEY HAVE SUFFERED --”_

Magnus turned the iPad off again.

It flicked on again.

_“-- NO MATTER THE PAIN THEY HAVE FELT, --”_

Magnus held the power button down for twenty seconds, waiting until the thing died off completely.

It flicked on again.

_“ -- WILL YOU STOP THAT? NO MATTER THE HEAT OF THE FIRE THAT LICKS AT THEIR SKIN--”_

Magnus threw the iPad across the room. It hit the wall with a sickening crack and bounced off of a shelf on the way down. It flickered helplessly for a minute, before going black. It was the first time Magnus had ever been pleased to have a screen break on him.

Behind the broken bits of plastic and glass, the LCD screen of the iPad flicked on. Kim Kardashian stood there, image distorted and discolored.

“ _\-- YOU WILL HAVE IT WORSE, MAGNUS, THAN EVEN THE MOST WRETCHED OF HELL. DO NOT TRY TO RUN.”_

Magnus began rooting around in the cupboards. He had to have a hammer somewhere.

_“THERE IS NO ESCAPE. SIMPLY STAY WHERE YOU ARE, AND SOMEONE WILL COME TO… COLLECT YOU.”_

The screen flickered -- once, twice, and then died.

* * *

 

Alec was pacing.

He had been pacing for a while now. He was going to pace a hole into his carpet, but his apartment was already in shambles, so it didn’t matter. Every square inch of the coffee table was covered, either by books or by empty coffee cups. The living room wall looked like an episode of Dateline. It was covered in pages of the Bible, of handwritten passages from Madame Dorothea’s prophecy book, of pictures painfully printed off of Alec’s monster of a printer, and sigils of all kinds (both divine and infernal), all connected together by red string. It looked like the work of a lunatic. Alec himself wasn’t looking much better; theoretically, he was still wearing the same suit, but he had abandoned the jacket, and the pants and the shirt were so rumpled and stained with coffee that it was quite hard to tell. Of all the human vices Alec had indulged in, slovenliness had never been one of them, but the End of The World affects everyone in different ways.

Alec was stalling.

He knew who the Antichrist was. He knew where the Antichrist was. He knew exactly what he _ought_ to do -- which was to call Heaven, but he _wanted_ to call Magnus. (This was only partially because of his discovery; Alec was also acutely aware that he had gone over twenty four hours without talking to the demon, and Alec kind of just wanted to ask how his day was going.)

There was a right thing to do, and a wrong thing. Angels had to do the right thing. They were _programmed_ to do the right thing.

Alec did the wrong thing.

After a few painful minutes spent rummaging around the landfill that was his coffee table, Alec found his phone. He winced when he saw the screen. In the last twenty four hours, he had missed twenty calls. All of them were from Magnus.

Magnus was number one on Alec’s speed dial. Magnus was also the only one on Alec’s speed dial. Alec hit number one and tried not to think about the meaning behind that, and listened to the dial tone for a frustratingly long amount of time before Magnus finally picked up.

 _“Hello?”_ came Magnus’ voice.

All Alec could think for a moment was how nice it felt to hear Magnus’ voice. He gripped the phone tighter. “Magnus,” he said, “Look, I--”

 _“Now isn’t a good time,”_ gasped Magnus from the other end of the phone.

Alec frowned at that. “What? Why not?” He could hear Magnus’ ragged breathing from across the phone line. Unless someone was standing on Magnus’ windpipe, it sounded like...

Alec’s heart jumped to his throat, and warmth flooded his face with the realization. The world could end at any moment. Of course Magnus would be trying to have a good time while he could. “Oh my God, Magnus -- you’re not -- _you know_ \--”

“ _God,_ no,” came Magnus’ rushed reply. He sounded annoyed. “ _Goodbye, Alexander._ ”

And then the call went dead.

Alec cursed out loud. And then he cursed again. It was something he generally tried not to do, being an angel and all, but sometimes it was necessary. He kicked the leg of the coffee table for good measure. It didn’t really make him feel any better, but it did send a coffee mug careening to the floor. It shattered on impact, leaving a puddle of coffee in its wake.

“Great,” muttered Alec. He didn’t even bother to pick it up. It didn’t really matter at this point -- this, along with most of the world, was going to be gone in a few days. Magnus would be happy about that, Alec thought with a rueful smile. He had always hated Alec’s place.

Alec frowned, and told himself not to think of Magnus. Or, to at least focus on being annoyed at Magnus. He had called Magnus in his time of need, and Magnus had been too busy doing… whatever he was doing, to even give Alec the time of day. And it was much easier to be annoyed at Magnus than it was to be worried about him, and Alec had already started running a thousand and one scenarios in his head about why Magnus, who was always there for him at the drop of a hat, would have hung up the phone. None of these scenarios were right, but a few of them were awfully close.

* * *

 

Clary was in the tree house packing her bag when Simon came bursting ungracefully through the hole in the floor. She spun around, eyes wide, as she watched her friend struggle to pull himself up. There was muffled yelling from down below, and then a sharp push sent Simon sprawling forward onto the wood floorboards. After a moment, Maureen’s head of curly hair popped up, and she pulled herself up and into the treehouse with far more ease than Simon had managed. Clary raised her eyebrows.

“What are you two doing?”

“What are _we_ doing?” asked Simon between panted breaths. He forced himself up off his stomach and stood. He was getting taller in relation to the tree house, Clary noticed. The three of them were just a few years away from not being able to stand upright in it any more. “What are _you_ doing?”

“Did you get my note?”

“Of course we got your note,” said Maureen, pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. Written in green color pencil was, ‘Don’t come looking for me. Love, Clary.’ “What does this mean?”

“Did you read it?”

“That’s why we’re here,” said Simon. “Clary, you’ve been acting weird lately. At first we thought you were just messin’ around, but… we’re worried about you. What’s going on?”

Clary bit her lip. She wasn’t too sure herself. All she knew was that the world seemed to be changing around her, and that there was somewhere she needed to go. She had felt it since her birthday. When her parents watched the news and it was filled with stories about Atlantis, or about a wizarding school being discovered in England, or the mermaids off the coasts of Florida, she knew, inexplicably, that she was at the center of it.

“I don’t know,” said Clary.

“You don’t know?” repeated Maureen.

“D’you ever feel like things are just… about to change?” asked Clary, throwing her backpack over her shoulders. “Like, everything’s just going on as usual, and then one day, it’s all different? You wake up and you just know that things are going to change. And even though it’s been this way for thousands of years, it’s all kind of been leading up to this point, like a ball rolling down a hill. It doesn’t matter who you are anymore, who you think you are, everything is going to change whether you’re ready or not. I don’t think I’m ready.”

“Clary, you’re scaring me,” said Simon, eyes wide behind his glasses.

Clary looked at her friends. She pulled them both into a tight hug, the kind they had shared many times before. After a few long moments, she released them and turned to the hole her friends had come up from. She climbed down from the tree house with practiced ease, and made her way to her bike.

Simon and Maureen came clambering down after her. Simon stumbled a little bit when he hit the ground, but kept his momentum up, coming to a stop just in front of Clary. He clamped his hands down her handlebar.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to fix it,” Clary said.

“Fix _what_?” asked Maureen, hands on her hips and worry in her eyes.

“All of…. this,” said Clary with a wave of her hand. She kicked up the stand to her bike. “I have to.”

Maureen and Simon watched her. They took in the steely determination in her green eyes, and the stubborn set of her chin. Clary had always been a kind girl, but she was also headstrong. Maureen and Simon glanced at one another, sharing a look.

“Fine,” said Maureen finally, walking to where her own bike was parked in the Fairchilds’ back yard. “We’re coming with you.”

“You can’t,” said Clary immediately. “It’s dangerous.”

“We’re not just gonna let you go alone,” said Simon, swinging a leg over his own bike. “Look. You said the world is changing, right?”

Clary nodded.

“Well, I don’t care how much the world changes. It’ll still be the three of us.”

Clary tightened her hands on the handlebars, and looked at her friends’ determined faces, heart swelling. It had always been the three of them, ever since she was a little girl. Simon was right. Clary wouldn’t let that change for the whole world.

Something nudged at her foot. Clary looked down and saw Spot, little tail wagging happily.

Clary smiled and scooped him up. She set him in the handlebar basket, then swung up on her bike.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

 

Magnus’ first priority, naturally, was to change. And to fix his hair. If he was going to die (which seemed likelier and likelier by the second), then he was going to do so in style.

His second priority was to inch over toward the balcony. He crept towards the rail, and peered out just enough to look down onto the street. None of the humans milling about seemed to notice the car-shaped mass that was inching slowly down the street, stuck behind a million other vehicles in a heavy congestion of traffic. Magnus grimaced. The “car” looked like it had been designed by someone who had never actually seen a car; it looked like a child’s drawing brought to life. There were no wheels, for one, and the shape seemed design to hinder aerodynamics, rather than to help it. The driver sat on the hood like a carriage driver. It was nice to know that even in these trying times, Hell was as incompetent as ever.

Magnus looked back into the loft, a bit regretfully.

He loved the place. He really did. He had been in the same brownstone for the majority of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. It was beautiful, lovingly decorated and redecorated. He sighed as he walked through the room, running his fingers over a 16th century tapestry that adorned one of the walls. Unlike Alec’s prison cell of an apartment, Magnus’ showcased all of the important things about living on earth -- beauty, history, comfort, style. He could walk through the loft and tour the eras he had lived through, the ingenuity and beauty created and curated by human beings. They really were something.

He didn’t focus on that now. Instead, he walked straight to his room and then into his own closet. It took an embarrassingly long time to push through the rows and rows of clothing -- Alec was probably right about the hoarding thing -- to the huge black safe nestled in the very back corner.

There was a pair of gloves sitting on top of it, an ugly, surgical blue pair of latex gloves. Magnus pulled them on with a snap, just like the doctors on TV, and then set about carefully opening the safe.

Inside was a plastic-wrapped crate of water bottles. Magnus dragged it through the apartment carefully, leaving a path of knocked over vases and shelves in his wake. It pained him to do so, but it didn’t really matter. By the end of the night, the entire building was probably going to be burned to the ground. It was probably a good thing Magnus (and most of the world) would be dead sometime in the next few days, because Magnus’ only other option, really, was to go stay with Alec, and he couldn’t do that. He really couldn’t do it. The close proximity to the angel would be bad enough, but to spend even a few days in that hideous excuse for modern architecture? Even to be close to Alec, Magnus didn’t know if it would be worth it.

(Magnus did know. It would be worth it.)

He hauled the crate of water bottles onto the kitchen island and used a steak knife to sever the plastic. He grabbed an enormous pot (purchased exclusively for this purpose, because Magnus had never cooked a single meal for himself in six thousand years) from one of the cupboards and, carefully, cracked open a water bottle, beginning the arduous process of emptying them into the pot.

It was holy water. Alec had blessed it himself, not long after the Antichrist had first made her way up to earth. He hadn’t really asked questions at the time, and Magnus hadn’t offered an explanation. It hadn’t really been an elaborate ritual, contrary to what Catholics believed, but maybe the blessings of angels were just more potent than those of humans. Alec had simply stood over the case of water, head bent, eyes down, long eyelashes brushing against his cheeks, and said a few prayers on Magnus’ balcony one evening. The whole situation had been both incredibly ludicrous and strangely arousing.

Magnus hadn’t known what he was going to do with it, but it seemed like it would come in handy. One version of this had involved him, a case of holy water, and  his jetted tub, just in case things got really futile, but the other version was this.

It took a few minutes to fill the pot, and Magnus winced at the mountain of plastic bottles left on the counter. He could hear Alec in his head, yelling at him to recycle. Plastic had been one of Magnus’ inventions. To be fair, he had always pictured the world ending in a fiery war between Heaven and Hell, rather than because of global warming and rising sea levels and a depleted ozone layer, but these days he felt a bit guilty about it.

Magnus rooted around in his cupboard until he found a spray bottle full of cleaning solution. He emptied it into the sink, rinsed it out once or twice, and then began to fill it with holy water. As far as weapons went, it wasn’t the best, but it would do. He should have invested in a Super Soaker.

Through the open door of the balcony, he could hear the sound of something coming to a screeching halt outside of his apartment. He thought he heard the tell-tale clomping of horses, and snorted; he could only imagine what it would look like to have a horse-drawn carriage traipsing through Brooklyn in the middle of the day. A harsh banging at the building’s front doors reverberated all the way up to Magnus’ loft, followed by the deafening sound of glass shattering.

Magnus dragged a barstool through the apartment and to the front door, which he propped open, then doubled back to the pot. He held it out very carefully and clambered up the bar stool. He only had one shot at this, and if he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up deep fried.

Once the pot was propped up precariously on the top of the door, Magnus retreated back toward the kitchen area, and crouched behind the island. His heart pounded in his chest. Blood rushed through his ears. There were heavy steps racing up the stairs, heavy enough to shake the entire building, and one of the drained bottles rolled around on the island. It came to a stop just above Magnus, and a single drop of holy water fell from the lip of the bottle onto the side of Magnus’ neck. It burned excruciatingly, and Magnus bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood to keep from screaming at the pain.

That hurt. Magnus hoped desperately that it wasn’t Ragnor they had sent after him. Or Catarina. In all of Hell, those were probably the only two demons Magnus shared any kind of friendship with, and he would hate to put either of them through that. It would probably be fatal.

The footsteps got louder, pounding through the building, and the door flew open with a bang. The pot fell heavily from the door with a loud clang, hitting what sounded like the door and a human being on the way down. Water rained down on the demon, and it _wailed_. It was a scream that went right to Magnus’ bones, the kind of blood-curdling scream of agony normally heard only in the deepest circles of Hell. It was deafening. It was accompanied by the sound of sizzling, and the cloying scent of burnt flesh flooded Magnus’ senses. He shivered. It had been a long time since he had smelled anything like it -- he tried to avoid the lower pits of Hell when he could, and believe it or not, warfare was largely a human sport.

Someone swore. Magnus felt like doing the same.

There were at least two of them -- hopefully only one at this point. Magnus wanted to bang his head back against the cabinets, but he didn’t dare to. He didn’t even dare to breathe -- not that he needed to, but still. A bit of a habit at this point.

The screaming suddenly stopped. Thick clouds of dark smoke rolled through the apartment, the only remains of the first demon. The other stormed through the apartment, feet squelching disgustingly with each step. Magnus frowned. There weren’t exactly etiquette classes in Hell, but to track the remains of another demon across the expensive carpet? Magnus would never be able to get that out.

Magnus tightened his hold on the spray bottle and closed his eyes, listening intently to the second demon’s footfalls. He was retreating toward the back of the loft, toward the bedrooms. Slowly, with as much dignity as he could muster, Magnus began to crawl around the island. If luck was on his side, he might be able to just… edge around the island and slip out the front door. He sent out a silent plea for help. He wasn’t sure if it was to God or to the Devil, as long as _someone_ could grant him safe passage.

His pleas for help fell on deaf ears. He had just rounded the corner, idly moaning the damage it was doing to the knees of his suit, when his line of sight was suddenly interrupted by two sludge covered feet.

The demon wasn’t even wearing shoes. God, demons really were animals.

“Hello, Magnus,” greeted the demon, a smirk on his face. He was handsome. He was dressed like a Party City version of a Pilgrim. He obviously hadn’t been topside in a long time.

“Hi,” said Magnus, and then shot at him with the spray bottle.

The demon hissed in pain, but he was quick enough to shoot out a leg and kick the bottle out of Magnus’ hand. It went flying, sailing to the other side of the island with a heavy thud. The two stared at one another for a moment, and then went scrambling after it.

Magnus stood on shaky legs, raced around the island and, abandoning the last of his dignity, lunged for the spray bottle -- only to have the other demon  jump onto his back, push his face into the hardwood floor, and grab for it himself. Magnus rolled over, harshly slamming the demon back into the side of the island, and reached for the bottle again.The demon shot a hand out, smacking the water bottle further into the living area.

The two of them continued like this for a while, viciously alternating between beating the Hell out of one another and lunging for the spray bottle. The damage to the loft, Magnus realized when a Ming Dynasty vase went crashing to the ground, was beyond repair.

After a few more minutes of desperately retaliating, Magnus found himself pressed up against the couch, spray bottle just out of reach, with the demon’s foot pressing down against his throat. His bare, sludge covered foot pressing down against Magnus’ throat.

Magnus hadn’t had many bad days, but this was probably the worst.

“You’re going to suffer a fate worse than death, my friend,” warned the demon.

“Oh, I believe I already am,” said Magnus. It was hard to speak with someone crushing his windpipe, but Magnus had never been good at letting others have the last word.

The demon pressed down harder, and Magnus sputtered for air. It didn’t matter that he didn’t need to breathe; it was painful.

“Wait,” he croaked, scrambling for something, anything to save himself. If he could just reach the damn spray bottle….

The demon tutted. “Time to go, Magnus,” he said in a bored voice. “They are going to tear you to _pieces_ down there.”

Magnus was beginning to regret not just pouring a glass of wine, lighting some candles, and pouring the holy water directly into his bathtub. He glared down at the foot on his neck. At least that would have been a relatively clean death.

“Wait,” Magnus tried again, “There’s something I need to tell you, something about… about the Plan.”

And then, of course, with Magnus nearly one step away from death, Alec finally called back.

Magnus could have cried -- he didn’t know if they were tears of joy or sadness. “How Do You Talk to An Angel” blared through the apartment, amplified by the near silence. The demon stared in dismay down at Magnus, shocked that Magnus’ trouser pockets had suddenly started belting one of the cheesiest hits of the 90s.

“Just -- don’t move,” commanded Magnus. Might as well utilize the demon’s surprise for something. He slid his phone out of his pocket and answered the call with a swipe of his thumb. “Hello?’

 _“Magnus,”_ came Alec’s breathless reply, _“Look, I --”_

“Now isn’t really a good time,” Magnus gasped out. The demon looked, if anything, amused. He dug his heel further into Magnus’ throat, and Magnus choked.

 _“What? Why not?”_ came Alec’s panicked reply. And then after a few long seconds of listening to Magnus’ ragged breathing, he spat, suspiciously, _“Oh my God, Magnus -- you’re not_ \--you know--”

“God, no,” said Magnus emphatically. “Goodbye, Alexander.” And with that, he ended the call.

“Say your goodbyes?” asked the demon, face contorted into a knowing smirk.

“Indeed I have,” said Magnus, and then, “Good riddance.” He dramatically flipped the phone around, revealing Alec’s contact image -- a very simple drawing of a crucifix.

The demon recoiled instantly, hissing and covering its face as if burned. Magnus rolled his eyes. _How overdramatic._  Crucifixes were a little irritating at most -- but it bought Magnus time. He took the opportunity to lunge for the bottle of holy water. The second his hand wrapped around it, he squeezed the trigger, releasing a thick jet of water directly into the demon’s face. The demon howled, hands clutching at his eyes. Magnus pumped the spray bottle rapidly, blasting the demon with as much of the water as possible. Errant holy water ran down his own arm, scalding the flesh of his arm and his wrist. He didn’t care.

The demon began to smoke. Magnus dropped the bottle and  tore out of the room as quickly as he could, racing down the steps and out the destroyed door. He flung himself into his car.

Magnus flew down the streets of New York City at 90 miles an hour. The roads were conveniently empty.

* * *

 

Contacting Heaven was easy -- for humans. It didn’t really take much. Clasp your hands together, bow your head, maybe light a candle. Most humans didn’t expect an answer, and were shocked to get one back. It was a bit more difficult for angels.

The apartment was already trashed, and it wasn’t like Alec was going to be around to pay for any repairs in the next month, so he simply pushed all of the living room furniture out of the way. He peeled the grey rug back from the hardwood floors and summoned a piece of chalk.

Alec had never been an artist, but the circle he drew was perfect. He ringed it in larger circles, intersected it with a few others, and then began to fill the remaining space with a script that hadn’t been seen on earth in a couple thousand years. He placed seven candles strategically around different points of the main circle, then ignited them with a wave of his hand.

He stepped back, and said the Words. And then, when no one answered, he said the Words again.

A thick column of blue light filled the circle, shooting up to the ceiling. It was brighter than the sun, but Alec didn’t shield his eyes.

It flickered for a few moments, shifting between forms. Alec could only see pieces at a time -- six beating wings, a beast with multiple heads, a shuffling being of hyperbolic geometry, a shaft of pure, unadulterated light -- before it finally solidified into a woman. Alec’s heart sank.

The woman was a couple heads shorter than Alec, but she dominated the room. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the back of her head, showcasing the displeased expression on her face. She wore a beautifully tailored suit, and her arms were crossed over her chest.

Alec didn’t have a mother. None of the angels did. But there was something about Maryse, something coldly maternal, that always made Alec feel like a small child being berated by a parent.

“Yes?” asked Maryse stiffly. Her voice buzzed around the edges, as if limned by a thousand other voices. She was one of the Metatron -- the voices of God -- and she carried the weight of all of their voices in hers.

“Hello,” greeted Alec and then, because it felt rude not to, he tacked a half hearted “ma’am” to the end of it.

Maryse did not look pleased. “Alexander. You know that we are very busy up here. Why did you call?”

“I found the Antichrist,” said Alec. “I know where she is.”

“And…?”

“And there’s still time to, you know --” Alec cut himself off abruptly. He and Magnus had spent the last few days desperately trying to find the Antichrist, to figure out where she was and to stop the Great War, but he had yet to think about the how of it all. And now, he realized with horror, the only way to do that would probably be to kill her before it happened.

He certainly wasn’t going to suggest murdering an eleven year old girl to one of the most esteemed angels in the ranks, though, so Alec simply said, lamely, “You know… time to stop everything…”

Maryse stared at him. “Alec,” she said, slowly, “you are aware that the goal is not to _stop_ the war, but to _win_ it, are you not?”

“I know, but… all the people --”

“The worthy will live on in Heaven,” said Maryse. Her was face like a mask of stone. “The unworthy will cease to be. It is written.”

Alec frowned, eyes darting to the ground. Who was worthy, he wondered, and who was unworthy? Who decided these things -- A priest? The hierarchies of angels? God Himself? Alec hadn’t seen Him in a couple thousand years, and he highly doubted many other angels had. A few humans, maybe. It didn’t seem right, to be playing a cosmic war in the backyard of humanity. None of them had been on earth, none of them had witnessed what Alec had witnessed -- the selfishness, the sacrifices, the hubris, the humility, all of the terrible and wonderful things that made humanity great. How could they possibly judge it?

Maryse sighed. She extended a hand and lifted Alec’s chin up. The gesture was gentle, but her grip was firm. Alec slowly raised his eyes to meet her gaze, which blazed with righteous fury.

“There is a plan, Alexander,” Maryse said, voice soft. “I know that you have become accustomed to living here, but this is what is meant to be. It is inevitable. Ineffable.” She gave him a pat on the cheek, one that was almost maternal, and dropped her hand to her side. “Now,” she said, businesslike as ever, “I trust you will be there?”

Alec hadn’t lifted a flaming sword in thousands of years, but he didn’t suppose he had much of an option. He shrugged.

Maryse stared at him, obviously displeased with the lack of an answer.

“Yes, I will be there.”

“Wonderful. Now, if you are finished wasting my time, I must be going. It’s getting quite busy up here. Our brethren are amassing our troops. I can’t imagine it will be much longer now.”

“No, I can’t imagine it will be,” agreed Alec, as if in a daze. Only a couple of hours, at most. “How… exactly will it begin?”

Maryse smiled. It was the practiced smile of a diplomat, one with a hidden trump up her sleeve. “We were thinking a multinational nuclear exchange would be an excellent start. The last century of weaponry advances wasn’t exactly an accident.”

“Of course not.”

“Would you like to join me?” asked Maryse, stepping away from the center of the circle, enough to make room for Alec.

They were interrupted by a fierce banging on the front door. Maryse’s mouth narrowed into a firm line, and she followed Alec’s gaze with obvious distaste.

“That’s just takeout from Taki’s,” said Alec quickly. Prompted by Maryse’s blank stare, he explained, “Um, it’s food. Why don’t you go on ahead, I...um... I think I’d better wrap some things up here, first. Some business matters.”

Maryse’s frown deepened. “That hardly seems to matter now, does it?”

“Yes. I mean, no, but it just seems like it would be rude not to,” said Alec, who rarely went out of his way to not be rude. “And I should probably pay for the food,” he tacked on as an afterthought. The sound of the banging was getting even louder; if Alec hadn’t known any better, he would think someone had taken a battering ram to his front door.

“Very well,” said Maryse. “I will see you shortly.

And then she was gone in a rustle of wings, a susurrus of low voices, and a blinding flash of light.

It was right in the nick of time, too; less than a minute after she had left, Alec’s front door exploded into a million splinters, and in clambered Magnus, looking just about as bad as Alec felt. There was a bottle of wine in his hand. It reminded Alec of that morning eleven years ago, when Magnus had shown up just after dawn with a bottle of wine and an insane plan to avert the Apocalypse.

And look how well that had gone.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” said Magnus in lieu of greeting. “It has some character now. My dear Alexander, what on earth did that suit ever do to you?”

“Magnus,” said Alec with a breath of relief. And then he did something that he had wanted to do for a couple hundred years, and he grabbed Magnus by the shoulder and hauled him in for a tight hug.

Magnus went stiff with shock in his arms. After a second, he wound one arm -- the one not holding the wine bottle -- around Alec’s waist in response.

It felt nice, but it was _really_ awkward.

Alec released Magnus, and held him at arm's’ length. The two spoke at the same time.

“Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“Why did you hang up on me?”

They shared matching scowls.

“I tried calling you dozens of times yesterday, Alexander --”

“-- yeah, and then you _hung up on me_ when I called you today --”

“-- I was a bit tied up --”

“-- Oh my God, it _was_ a sex thing --”

“-- It _wasn’t_ a sex thing!” snapped Magnus.

The two glared at each other for a moment. Alec’s eyes flicked up and down Magnus’ face. He looked like he had spent the last hour brawling in the city sewers, but he still looked dangerously good. Alec’s gaze darted from Magnus’ eyes, to his mouth, then back to his eyes again -- then back down to his bloodied mouth. His eyebrows knitted together.

“You’re hurt,” he said. Magnus rolled his eyes and turned his face away, and Alec caught his chin with a gentle grip. His thumb brushed smoothly over Magnus’ lower lip, healing the laceration instantly and wiping the area of blood. Magnus stared at him with wide, uncertain eyes. Alec’s hand moved from Magnus’ mouth down to his neck, and Alec gently tilted the demon’s head to examine the patch of burned skin at the junction of his neck and his shoulder. Alec’s fingers drifted over it, and he frowned when it didn’t immediately heal under his touch.

“Holy water. Don’t bother.”

Alec looked up from Magnus’ neck to his eyes. He didn’t move the hand on Magnus’ face, or the one on his neck. He could feel Magnus’ racing pulse under his fingertips. “What -- holy water? Magnus, what happened?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” said Magnus. “I think Pandemonium sold us out.”

“Damn it,” cursed Alec. He lightly pressed his fingers deeper into the burn at Magnus’ neck, trying to sooth it with little bursts of healing power. Nothing.

“It’s not going to work, Alexander,” said Magnus, reaching up and catching Alec’s hand in his. He lowered it gently. “I always did want to be touched by an angel, though,” he joked.

Alec rolled his eyes, the moment broken. He sighed and begrudgingly dropped his hands away from Magnus. He eyed the bottle of wine dubiously. “What is that for?”

“I have come to drink,” said Magnus, and Alec’s mouth twitched upward at the familiarity of the words. “Hell realized they had the wrong Antichrist and bribed -- or tortured, I’m not sure -- someone at Pandemonium into coming clean about our agreement. Hell sent someone to collect me, and now my apartment is destroyed. I have no clue where the Antichrist is, and the world is going to end in a matter of days --”

“-- hours --”

“--yes, hours, so I figured that I might as well get _thoroughly_ wasted with my only friend in the world before I am dragged to Hell and mercilessly tortured beyond my wildest dreams,” said Magnus. And then he frowned. “‘ _Hours_?”

“We’re friends?” asked Alec, taken aback.

“I -- yes, of course we’re friends, Alexander,” he reassured Alec quietly. “No, wait -- what do you mean, hours? How do you know that?”

“I know who she is,” said Alec in a rush, “I know where she is, I know when it’s going to happen, I --” and then he cut himself off, face flushing red.

“What? How?”

“I… found this,” said Alec carefully, stepping away from Magnus and rounding toward the the displaced coffee table. He spent an embarrassing amount of time rooting around for it, but he finally find out the book under a tower of mugs. He carefully pulled it out from under the teetering tower. He had always been good at Jenga. “Here,” Alec said, proffering Madame Dorothea’s book of prophecies toward Magnus.

Magnus flipped it over in his hands. His eyes went wide with recognition. “You _found_ this? Alec, do you have any idea what this is? Where did you find it?”

“...On that yacht.”

Magnus stared at him. “You _stole_ it?”

“I appropriated and salvaged it for divine purposes,” Alec corrected. And then, after a moment of being subjected to Magnus’ pointed stare, he amended, “Fine. I stole it.”

Magnus burst out laughing. The sound of it warmed Alec’s heart.

“Oh, Alexander,” he sighed, “you always surprise me.”

“I found out where the girl is,” said Alec, dropping a hand to Magnus’ shoulder and guiding him toward the wall covered in bible passages and a spiderweb of red string. “And when it’s going to happen.”

Magnus stared at the wall in horror. “This looks like something a serial killer would make.”

“Look, don’t -- just ignore that,” said Alec impatiently. “ _This_ ,” he jabbed at a handwritten passage from Madame Dorothea’s book, and followed one of the red strings that connected it to a bible passage, “and _this_ ,” and then he followed another string to a printed out Cosmo article about Horoscopes, “and _this_ ,” he continued, following a final string toward a printed out list of MapQuest directions, “all point to her being _here_.” He stabbed at the page of MapQuest directions. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Nothing,” said Magnus, assuming a look of practiced innocence. “I believe you.” He ran his fingers over the mess Alec had made of the wall, eyes tracking back and forth over the tangled mess. He flipped through the book a little bit, as if corroborating Alec’s work, and then back up. Finally, he glanced up at Alec, a smile breaking over his face.

“It really is her, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Alec, nodding furiously. “Do you know what this means--”

“I do,” said Magnus, beaming. He stepped forward,, resting a hand on Alec’s chest. “You did it, Alexander. God, I could kiss you.”

“Yeah?” asked Alec quietly, before he could lose his nerve. His heart pounded inside his chest. He was sure Magnus could feel it through the thin fabric of his dress shirt. He took a step closer, eyes darting down to Magnus’ hand, and then back up to his eyes.  “Why don--”

He was cut off by an agonizing scream from the floor below, and the sound of something crashing. A scent that smelled suspiciously like human flesh burning filled the apartment, but not a single fire alarm had gone off.

“Damn it,” swore Magnus. His hand tightened in Alec’s shirt for a second, and then he released it. Alec wanted to scream. This had to be some kind of cosmic joke. Magnus dragged a hand through his hair. “They must have followed me here.”

“What?”

“We have to go, Alec,” said Magnus, tugging at Alec’s wrist, “as fast as we can. We have to go find her.”

The sound of crashing continued, and Alec allowed himself to be dragged away by Magnus. “Wait,” he said, attempting to yank the sheet of MapQuest directions from where they were expertly stapled to the wall, “won’t we need these?”

“Seriously, Alexander, have you never heard of GPS?”

* * *

 

The twisting trails through the forest were familiar. They were the ones that Clary had taken all of her life, from when she was just a baby strapped to her mom’s back for a hike, to the countless summer days spent exploring with her friends. There was _something_ amassing overhead, something contentious and heavy enough to burst the afternoon sky. As Clary pedaled away, she could feel the Hosts of Heaven and Hell in their entirety watching her as she raced through the forest on her bike. She thought of those fun days traipsing about the woods, and wondered if they would be gone forever, but she couldn’t think about that. She would soon be making the world anew, after all, reshaping it into something for herself. There was something calling to her -- something both familiar and foreign, pulling at her as if by a string attached to her heart.

Maureen and Simon followed, and as they cleared the border of the forest and crossed into an unblemished field, Clary was glad she wasn’t doing this alone.

It wasn’t far to the Fairfield Airbase. As Clary approached, an expanse of chain link fence conveniently disappeared, allowing them to glide onto the black top. The runway of the small air base seemed to have expanded monumentally, and Clary could see ghostly, flickering images of bombers lining the pavement, an omen of the future soon to come.

Perched on motorcycles in the center of the black top were four menacing figures. Clary came to an abrupt halt, dismounted her bike, and squared her shoulders.

* * *

 

Getting out of the building hadn’t been very difficult. The convenient thing about being on the run from demons was that, as Magnus and Alec had already noticed before, they were chronically incompetent and had even less of a propensity for technology than Alec did. While a handful of demons clawed their way up the side of the building (one of which was sent toppling back toward the Manhattan streets after taking a squeegee to the face from a very surprised window cleaner) and another handful ran up so many flights of stairs they could probably generate enough energy to fuel a small island country, Alec and Magnus simply took the elevator down. They spent the ride with a chatty pair of Mormon Elders who seemed to think the two of them were a couple, but were still friendly enough anyway. Alec and Magnus had made stilted, polite conversation. Mormons weren’t quite a cult, but they weren’t quite Christians either. Neither Magnus or Alec really knew what to make of them.

They trashed the armful of pamphlets and literature the Mormons had given them in the building’s lobby and ran like Hell for Magnus’ Ferrari. Magnus didn’t have anything to say about the seatbelt this time; in fact, Alec’s door was still open when Magnus slammed his foot on the gas pedal and took off speeding down Park Avenue. If he was a little careless about clearing the road, it could only be chalked up to nerves. At least if he hit someone here, it would probably just be some soulless business mogul. The world could use a few less of those.

Magnus handed Alec his cell phone and asked him to plug in the address. When the GPS voice command finally started, Magnus was brimming with pride -- the whole process had only taken Alec ten minutes.

With midday traffic, it was almost a three hour drive to the outskirts of Amenia, New York. If he tried hard enough, Magnus could probably break the sound barrier, but he had already destroyed his apartment and didn’t want to destroy his car, too. There had been enough loss for one day.

Alec squirmed in his seat.

“Alexander,” said Magnus quietly, “you need to calm down.”

“I am calm,” Alec snapped. Magnus smiled.

“Of course you are, angel,” he agreed. It earned him a glare. All in all, it felt very familiar.

They drove in silence for a while. Alec gave the occasionally strangled scream in response to Magnus’ driving, but Magnus didn’t think it was anything more terrifying than any given cab driver in New York City.

Magnus’ mind drifted back to the moment in Alec’s apartment. For a second, he had thought Alec was going to kiss him. He gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, annoyed. He’d had half a mind to burn the building down and send the demons up in a fiery inferno for interrupting. It would kill two birds with one stone: get rid of the demons, and destroy that ugly building. All of New York City would probably celebrate.

Magnus let out a sigh. He deflated against his seat. The hand of his speedometer sat at 220 miles per hour, as far as it would go, and Magnus had no clue how fast he was driving. He glumly noted that the pink paint on the hood of the car was starting to peel back.

“Alexander,” he said quietly. There was no radio playing -- they normally listened to the radio in Magnus’ car. It was a great source of entertainment, mostly because it gave them something to bicker about, but there really wasn’t anything appropriate for the end of the world.

Alec shifted, turning his gaze from the road to Magnus. “Yeah?”

“Alec, I'm going to give you this option again. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Magnus told him, eyes purposely trained on the road, for once.

Out of the corner of Magnus’ eye, Alec frowned. “I… what?”

“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, Alec,” said Magnus. He accelerated a little bit more, testing the car’s limits.“I know we’ve been a bit… on top of each other lately,” he said, and he didn’t even go for the low-hanging innuendo, “but this is my fault, for the most part. Regardless of what happens tonight, I think we know what’s going to happen to me --”

“--Magnus--”

“-- and you don’t need to be a part of that,” said Magnus. There was a clunking noise that sounded suspiciously like his fender flying off. “I… If you would like to join your side now, or if you would like to flee to some other end of the world, or go to Taki’s for one last meal… I understand that,” he said gently.

Alec gawked at him silently. Magnus tightened his hands on the steering wheel. Thick ribbons of pink paint peeled off the car and littered the freeway. The tires were shredded.

“What -- Magnus, no. Are you serious?” asked Alec, finally, about the time the first of the side-view mirrors went flying.

“Alec, you don’t --”

“No,” said Alec, cutting him off. “Look, I don’t care about all of this,” he said, waving his hand, “Or a Great War, or a Return to Biblical Times. I mean, I do, because I have to, but I care more about --” he cut himself off and looked down. He ran a hand through his hair. His face had started to go an attractive shade of red. “We’re in this together,” he said, looking straight at Magnus. “We started this together, Magnus, and we’re going to end this together.”

Magnus was quiet for a moment. The entire car was falling to pieces around them, and it took a great deal of effort to hold it all together. “Thank you, Alexander,” he said quietly.

It was too quiet in the car. The air was too heavy. Finally, with a sigh, Magnus leaned forward and turned on the radio. The rest of the car might barely resemble a car anymore, but they might as well make an entrance.

Silently, Alec reached over and caught Magnus’ hand in his, and held it gingerly over the console. With the pad of his thumb, Alec rubbed small circles over Magnus’ skin. They stayed like that for the rest of the car ride, R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It” blaring around them.

* * *

 

Flames engulfed Magnus’ car when they finally arrived.

“Always make a big entrance,” Magnus joked, pulling his hand from Alec’s to kill the ignition. Despite the July heat, Alec’s hand suddenly felt very cold.

They got out of the car. Neither of them were dressed appropriately for the Great War, so Magnus cleaned himself up with a snap of his fingers, instantly changing into something clean, well-cut, and eccentric. He topped it with a red streak in his hair. For Alec, he took a more hands-on approach, literally running his hands over Alec’s shoulder and down his chest, and the suit was crisp and clean again. Alec didn’t mind the manhandling too much.

The field they parked (or, rather, crashed) in bordered the Amenia airbase, which would soon be filled with heavy bombers and ballistic missiles. Presently, there weren’t many people. Along with three children on brightly colored bikes, the Four Horsemen waited in all their glory. They had apparently got the memo that horses were out of style, messy, and altogether inconvenient. All four of them were perched atop motorcycles.

On War, it was a little comical -- she looked young, not much older than the young Antichrist herself. She had clear blue eyes and a ragged mass of red hair that flew out behind her. Her skin seemed to glitter in the afternoon light, slick with sweat. She sat straight upright, an imperious look on her face. Her crimson bike looked like a Mad Maxian war rig, towering higher than the others on giant tires and tipped with lethal looking spikes. It was pretty funny, considering she didn’t look much older than the gaggle of pre-teens she was staring down, and just as dirty. There was an AK-47 strapped to her back and a gleaming sword at her waist.

Famine relaxed at her side, looking bored atop a gleaming black bike. He was immaculately put together, wearing a suit that looked like it had been dragged off a runway. He had the face of an an angel, dark eyes set into light brown skin, all topped with curly black hair, not a single strand out of place. While War had clearly been getting her hands dirty well into the 21st century, Famine looked more like the kind of filthy rich CEO who would have shared the same ugly apartment complex as Alec.

The first two were familiar faces to Alec, but the third was not. Pestilence had been demoted in the mid twentieth century following the discovery of penicillin and the explosion of medical science, and he spent most of his days now desperately trying to make a comeback by propping up anti-vaxxing organizations and discouraging access to condoms. It apparently hadn’t been enough to get him a front row seat to the end of the world, because in his place stood Pollution -- a schmutzy looking young man with greasy blonde hair and a wrathful face, who seemed to both ooze and smoke at the same time. His bike left a long trail of gleaming oil across the blacktop of the airport. He smelled terrible.

And at their head was Death.

Death was hard to describe -- both conceptually and physically. He was pale, as if all of the color had been bleached from his solemn form. Under the bright July sun, it was almost as if he was made of smoke; a hand might be able to pass through him -- and yet, he was the most tangible of them all. He was the pallor left after a corpse had been drained of life, the dying breath that escaped into the air, only to be stolen away by the wind.

His presence was terrifying, but also somewhat reassuring. Universals were always inherently comforting to humans, and Death was no different.

The four of them were quite a contrast to the three children stationed opposite them -- a prideful looking young girl with dark skin and a mass of curly dark hair, a pale boy with dark hair whose skin had gone green with fear, and her.

Magnus hadn’t seen the Antichrist in years. Alec had never seen her. He had expected someone more… imposing. Not someone like Clary Fray. Not a sweet looking eleven year old girl with an open face, glass green eyes, and a tangle of red hair. She was perched on a seafoam green bike. There was a spotted puppy in the basket. She was arguing about something with War.

And unseen, teeming with energy in the skies above, were the hosts of Heaven and Hell, tensed and ready for war.

Magnus and Alec were, obviously, late. They both had ample experience with guiltily sneaking into churches or temple meetings late (surprisingly to some, Christians _and_ Satanists held gatherings on Sunday mornings, and both Alec and Magnus had learned to prioritize morning coffee over punctuality), though, and the two of them just sauntered nonchalantly toward the airbase, hoping to avoid the watchful eyes of Heaven or Hell. Hopefully, the watchful eyes of Heaven or Hell didn’t see the way they were gripping one another’s hands tight, either.

“IT IS DONE,” Death said calmly as Magnus and Alec sidled up.

Clary scrunched up her face like she had smelled something bad (because she had -- it was Pollution). She ran a hand over the head of the whimpering puppy in her basket and then, as if in afterthought, she leaned over and did the same to the whimpering little boy at her side. It didn’t seem to help much.

“Oh, that’s _really_ nice of you,” said Clary. She had obviously been raised with manners, and wasn’t that something? An Antichrist with manners. “But, um. No thank you.”

“NO THANK YOU?”

“Yeah, uh, y’see… I didn’t really _want_ it done. Um, thanks and all, but can’t we just like,” she gave a wave of her hand, “undo it?”

Death frowned. He looked  like a very displeased corpse. “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND,” said Death. “YOUR VERY EXISTENCE PORTENDS THE END OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.”

(“Should we…. you know?” whispered Alec to Magnus. They hovered awkwardly on the fringe of the pavement, still unnoticed. Alec decided it was more appropriate to make a finger gun with his hand than suggest out loud they shoot an eleven year old girl, because he held his hand out like a pistol.

Magnus looked around, frowning. Alec followed his gaze to where it landed on the AK-47 strapped to War’s back. Why hadn’t either of them had the forethought to bring some kind of a weapon to the Great War? Now they just looked stupid. Alec waved his hand, trying to summon a flaming sword, but to no avail. His eyes stopped on Clary’s small, charged form. He doubted any of his abilities would work around her.

Magnus looked Clary up and down for a moment, then darted his gaze guiltily back to Alec. “Maybe we should wait a little bit?”

Alec stared at him. “Until… she destroys the world in --” his eyes shot down to his watch -- “thirty seven minutes?”

Magnus flinched.)

“Who would write something like that? No, look,” said Clary, and she nudged the kickstand down on her bike, scooped the puppy to her chest, and walked over to Death. She put a hand on his hand, and he confusedly curled his fingers around hers. It looked like her hand had been engulfed by a cloud of smoke. “I really appreciate it and all, but I like the world how it is. There’s still lotsa stuff left for me to see and do, you know, so I don’t think people should go around writing that the world is just gonna end, so.” She squeezed Death’s hand. She didn’t even come up his elbow. “I’m just gonna undo it.”

“You can’t _undo_ it,” said War. Her voice was lilting and beautiful, with a touch of a British accent. Each word landed like artillery fire. “We are a part of you.”

Clary frowned. She released Death’s hand, and made her way over to War. The bike itself was taller than Clary, and she had to stand on her tiptoes to rest her hand over War’s.

“I don’t think so,” said Clary. She followed it quickly with, “No offense! I mean, yeah, sometimes I get mad and argue with my Mom and Dad if I’m grounded or something, and I accidentally broke Simon’s arm playing with swords last summer --” (the swords in question had been sticks, and Simon had basically broken his own arm by tripping over his feet) “-- but fighting isn’t any way to fix things. It just makes you more mad.” She took a step back, eyeing War warily, and said , “I think you should go away for now. And don’t come back for a little while.”

War stared at the girl in confusion, and then she was gone -- there was a flash of smoke and a loud **crack** , like someone had split the air, and then she was gone. The only thing that remained was her sword. Alec’s eyes darted towards it.

Clary kept walking. She came to Famine next.

“You were meant to lead us,” he reminded her.

Clary frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we need you, either. It’s not right, y’know. Millions of people can’t eat, but do you know how much food my family throws away? At least now we have a dog to feed it to,” she tossed her head back toward the puppy resting in her bike’s basket, “even if my Dad doesn’t want her. Anyway, I think there’s plenty to go around, people just need to share, so,” she rested a hand over Famine’s on the handlebar of his motorcycle, “I think you ought to leave people alone for a while.”

There was another _crack_ , but Magnus and Alec expected it this time. They covered their ears in perfect sync.

Famine was gone. In his place were a gleaming pair of silver scales. Clary continued her walk, and came to stand before Pollution. She reached out to rest her hand over his, and then thought the better of it.

“And you just smell bad,” she said honestly.

With another _crack_ , Pollution was gone, his crown sent rolling across the blacktop.

“What,” said Alec, more of a statement than a question.

“Don’t question it,” was Magnus’ advice.

Rubbing her hands together as if to wipe them clean, Clary made her way back to Death. She looked around wildly for a second, red hair flying about her shoulders, then back up at him. She held out her hand again, and he took it.

“Where’d they go?”

“BACK WHERE THEY BELONG,” said Death, albeit gently, “INTO THE MINDS OF MEN. BUT I AM NOT LIKE THEM --”  he squeezed Clary’s hand as if to illustrate his point “-- I BELONG TO THE REALM OF THE DEAD, AND TO THE REALM OF THE LIVING. EVEN YOU CAN NOT RID THE WORLD OF ME.”

“So they’re like…. gone for good?” asked Clary hopefully.

Death shook his head. “IT IS UNDONE. IT CAN NOT BE DONE WITHOUT THEM, BUT THEY WILL NOT BE GONE FOR LONG. THEY WILL BE BACK, EVENTUALLY.”

Clary shrugged. “Hopefully not for a while. There are still two whole months of summer left, y’know.”

If it was possible to see anything on the black hole of Death’s face, one might have seen his mouth quirk up into the faintest twitch of a smile. “GOODBYE, CLARISSA. I WILL SEE YOU AGAIN ONE DAY.”

There was a thunderclap that sounded like the rustling of wings, and Death was gone.

“Cool,” said Clary. She turned back and walked to her bike. She looked around -- her eyes finally landed on Magnus and Alec. There was something at once young and old about those eyes. She smiled, and then she flicked her gaze up to the sky and looked around, as if she could see each of the angels of Heaven and the demons of Hell ringing the earth. “Now, all of _this_ has to stop.”

And it did -- and for one whole moment, the world was perfectly good.

* * *

 

It didn’t last long, but it was a nice moment. The clouds began to break overhead.

“Is that it?” Alec asked. The three children apparently wanted nothing to do with them, because Clary and her friends were already swinging their legs over their bikes again, and chattering. “That’s -- that’s amazing. That’s it? She didn’t want to do it. So it’s just…”

“Over?” finished Magnus. “No.”

Alec raised an eyebrow. “What? But, you heard her --”

“No, it’s not over,” said Magnus, just as a bolt of lightning struck down from the sky, landing feet from Clary. Where it hit the earth, it took the shape of a woman -- a stern looking one in a black pantsuit.

“I don’t --”

“All of that was just a reason, angel. Wars don’t happen because an archduke was shot, or because the Four Horsemen decided to ride. Wars happen when two sides hate each other so much that the pressure just… builds.”

To the other side of Clary, a fire shot up from the earth, and when the smoke had cleared, a man stood there. He was tall, taller than Alec. His skin was pale, pulled taut over a bony face. His suit was white and pristine, something Magnus would almost certainly kill for. A circlet of barbed wire rested above his brow. When his eyes snapped open, they were gold and slit with cat-like pupils.

“Until it finally snaps,” finished Magnus, weakly.

Asmodeus, Prince of Hell, cast an imperious look about the gathered group. When his eyes landed on Magnus, his face broke into a slow, vicious smile, displaying sharply pointed teeth. Magnus could already see the flames of Hell dancing in his eyes, could practically picture his own mutilated body stretched out over a rack.

“Well, Alec,” he said, clapping a hand on Alec’s shoulder, “It’s been lovely knowing you. My only regret is that after all of our years together, you will be dying a virgin after all.” His eyes flicked over Alec’s body sadly. “A shame, really.”

Alec raised his eyebrows. Magnus expected him to react like he usually did -- to stutter and blush, and to snap at him for being incorrigible as always. Instead, Alec drew his gaze slowly up Magnus’ body and asked, “Would you like to fix that?”

Magnus barked out a shocked laugh, and lifted a gentle hand to rest over Alec’s heart. “Oh, Alexander,” he said, and his voice was soft and gentle, rather than the salacious purr he usually reserved for these situations. “there isn’t nearly enough time to do all the things I want to do with you.”

“I think we have all the time in the world,” Alec joked weakly.

“Have neither of you any shame?” snapped Maryse in her thousand voices, bringing the two of them back to the present. Magnus rolled his eyes, and released Alec’s hand. Alec looked thoroughly disappointed.

Magnus didn’t feel guilty for flirting with an angel in front of one of the Metatron, the entire Divine and Infernal Armies, and a Prince of Hell. He _did_ feel a little guilty for flirting with an angel in front of three children, though, so he kept his hands to himself.

Maryse’s mouth was a flattened into line so thin it looked like it might disappear. The look in her eyes said she was saving Alec for later. He was suddenly quite eager for the world to end.

Asmodeus spoke to Clary first. He looked at her and said something in an old language, one that sounded like nails scraping against a chalkboard, the buzz of a dentist’s drill, and the crunch of a breaking bone. Magnus understood it perfectly. Alec caught a word or two.

Clary frowned. “That’s not my name,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Asmodeus raised an eyebrow, and then tried again.

“Nope.”

He desperately tried one more time, this time using her full title.

“Um… no.”

“Little girl,” Maryse cut in, “we appre-”

“‘Little girl’ isn’t my name either,” snapped Clary, turning to look at Maryse now. “My name is Clary Fray.”

The Metatron and the Prince of Hell gave her a look that said that “Fray” was certainly _not_ her name, but kept their mouths shut on the matter. That was the problem with the big brass -- they spent so much time diligently playing the game, loftily planning the End of Time atop their perches in heaven or torturing souls in preparation for the Great War on their thrones in Hell that they simply didn’t understand the importance of Free Will. Clary may not have been _born_ a Fray (or even a human, in the strictest sense of the word), but she had _chosen_ to be one, which was why the following efforts were fruitless.

“Clary Fray,” amended Maryse diplomatically, “Of course. We do understand your reservations, but the best time for Armageddon is _now_. I understand you might find it a bit…inconvenient,” she settled on, “but a small amount of inconvenience is necessary for the greater good. The world will be made anew.”

“How _exactly_ it will be made anew has yet to be determined,” Asmodeus cut in, sounding like a desperate businessman trying to get in a sales pitch against his number one competitor, “for that is up to you to decide. Either way, you must make a choice. It is your destiny.”

Clary frowned. With a sigh, she begrudgingly dismounted from her bike for the second time that day, as if she knew this was going to take a while. It would have been quite funny to see her try to dismiss a Prince of Hell and one of the Metatron back to whence they came (Magnus briefly took a moment to wonder if that would send Asmodeus to Hell, or back up to Heaven), but instead she firmly planted her hands on her hips, and sized the two of them up.

“Well, _I_ don’t want the earth to be all burnt up,” she said. “I don’t get the point. You two want to boil the oceans and burn up the trees and kill all the animals and the people and the plants, but what’s the point? Just to see who has the better gang? It doesn’t matter, ‘cuz you’ll just get bored again and make it all over again and send more people like them --” she waved a hand toward Magnus and Alec, who were very conspicuously attempting to be inconspicuous “-- to come back here and mess around with people. It’s hard enough for people down here without you guys messing around with them.”

“Look,” said Maryse. Her patience was beginning to wear thin, and glimpses of her true form was beginning to slip through the cracks of the no-nonsense businesswoman guise she wore. Magnus pointedly kept his eyes averted. “Even, so this is the way it must happen, Clary Fray. All of Creation, the birth of Good and Evil, all of it was to lead up to to this p-”

“-- You know what? That’s another thing,” said Clary. “What’s the point in creating people to be _people_ and then getting mad when they _act_ like people?” This prompted a blank stare from Maryse and Asmodeus, but Magnus and Alec were nodding vigorously. “Maybe if you just let people be people and didn’t tell ‘em it was only gonna matter once they’re dead, maybe they’d focus a bit more on what’s happening down here. If I was in charge, I’d just make ‘em live longer, like the old days. And then they wouldn’t spend all their time killing whales and cutting down forests and making a mess of things here to, ‘cuz they’d know it would all still need to be here in a couple of hundred years. But that’s just my opinion.”

“And what a wonderful one it is,” said Asmodeus, sounding like he thought just the opposite, “and don’t you see? You wish to rule. You could have it your way. You could have the world exactly as you want it. You could rule--”

“Nope,” said Clary, popping the ‘P’. “Thank you, but no thank you, sir, ‘cuz I’ve thought about that. And it might be fun at first, but it’s boring. My Dad’s a police chief, you know --” Maryse and Asmodeus looked like they were literally biting their tongues “-- and he’s always busy, and he’s always off telling people what to do, and how to do it. I want to be an artist, you know, not a police chief. I don’t want to be telling everyone what to do and how to do it. Besides, I have a hard enough time thinking of fun things for us to do --” she motioned toward her group of friends, both of them still perched on their bikes, “-- I can’t think of things for the _whole world_ to do. So, um. Thank you, but no thank you.”

It was quiet on the blacktop of the air base. No one said anything for a moment -- no one even moved. Well, Clary’s friends were muttering about something and pointing at one of their watches (it was getting awfully close to dinner, and Simon’s mom had promised they’d go out for pizza), but out of the people who actually mattered, it was quiet. A tumbleweed even blew by, provided by Clary for dramatic flair.

Maryse broke the silence. “This is ridiculous,” she said, finally. “Even you cannot run counter to the Divine Plan. To His plan. None of us have any choice over this. It is written.”

“Why do people keep saying that? _I_ didn’t write it,” Clary said, “and I’m not gonna do it.”

“As much as I support rebellion,” Asmodeus said, and Magnus made a mental note of it later, to remind the Prince when he was breaking Magnus’ spine apart over the rack, “certain things are _beyond_ rebellion, Miss Fray. It must happen. _Now_. Just think about it.”

“I’m supposed to go get pizza with Simon and Mrs. Lewis tonight, though,” said Clary, but her voice wavered. She was thinking about it now. She was considering it. Something dark and complex coursed through Clary, something that, though untapped, had always lived inside her, because when it came right down to it, she was a part of the Plan, had been born because of it. And logically, if that was the _Plan_ , then it had to happen, right? Unless it wasn’t a very good plan.

Overhead, the clouds began to darken and swirl, trickling with lightning. The Hosts of Heaven and Hell were readying their weapons.

“She’s thinking about it,” said Magnus. He raked a hand through his hair, fingers carding through the red streak. “Damn it. For a minute, I thought she might not do it. That was nice while it lasted. Quick, Alexander,” he said, lifting a hand to Alec’s shoulder, “before it happens, my last request --”

Alec’s face contorted into a frown, and he stepped toward Clary and the envoys of Heaven and Hell. Magnus let his hand slip from Alec’s shoulder and tried not to be offended.

“Wait,” Alec said, cutting in. Three heads whipped toward him immediately. Any one of them could probably kill him in a fraction of a second. “Um, I mean. Excuse me.”

“Alec,” said Maryse, her voices sharp with a warning tone. “I do not have the time to be dealing with your insubordination right now.”

“I’m all for angelic insubordination,” interrupted Asmodeus. He procured a black business card out of thin air, and pressed it into Alec’s hand. “Great timing for it. Get on the right side while you still can, huh?”

Alec frowned, and looked down at the business card in his hand. It was a matte black, printed on very expensive paper. In elaborate Gothic letters, it had “ASMODEUS, PRINCE OF HELL”, and then in smaller letters below, “Rather Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven? Give Us a Call!” The contact information contained not a single phone number or e-mail address, but instead the page numbers of various Satanic texts where one could find a proper summoning ritual. All of the text looked like it was written in blood. Alec flicked it away.

“Hey, that’s littering!” Accused Clary, and Magnus went chasing after it.

“Those aren’t cheap, you know,” was all Asmodeus said.

“ _Alec_ ,” repeated Maryse.

“I’m not rebelling,” insisted Alec. “This Great Plan you’re talking about though, it is the _ineffable_ plan, right?”

“Alec,” said Maryse, a pained expression on her face. “I know you have been down here a long time, but I didn’t realize you had become so _stupid_. It is The Great Plan. You know this. Six thousand years of human life on earth, to be concluded with a Great War.”

“I know it’s the _Great Plan_ ,” said Alec, “but is it _ineffable_ as well?”

“Ineffable?” Clary repeated, dubiously. She obviously wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but when adults said _eff_ , or that something was _effed up_ , it usually meant that it was a bad thing. So maybe it _wasn’t_ a good plan, after all?

“It means too great or powerful to be expressed in words,” Alec explained to her. “It’s indescribable. You can’t describe it. You might not even be able to comprehend it. This Great Plan,” he motioned around, “it is _the_ Plan, right? The ineffable one.”

“Surely, it’s the same thing!” snapped Maryse.

“Is it?” asked Magnus, popping up behind Asmodeus. He had finally retrieved the business card, and he nonchalantly slipped it into the Prince’s breast pocket. Asmodeus shot him a look that might have killed a human on sight, and Magnus backed away slowly, trying to play it off as a saunter as he made his way back to Alec. He caught the angel’s eye, and the two shared a small grin.

“Because,” said Alec, and he smiled, “if it _is_ His Ineffable Plan, then how do you know this isn’t supposed to happen like this? It’s indescribable.”

“And if it _isn’t_ His Ineffable Plan,” continued Magnus smoothly, “then how do you know the Great Plan isn’t just a smaller part of His Even Greater, Unknown Plan? If everything is ineffable, than none of us can know.”

Maryse and Asmodeus had begun to waver. Clary just looked bored.

“But it’s the Great Plan,” said Maryse. “It’s…. written….”

“Maybe it’s written somewhere else?” Suggested Magnus, nonchalantly. He paced slowly around the group. His hair was, once more, perfectly coiffed. Maryse and Asmodeus followed his movement with narrowed eyes. “Somewhere you can’t read it. In bigger letters,” he punctuated each point with a flourish of his hands, “in _bolder_ letters. Underlined, even.”

“Twice,” cut in Alec.

“Twice,” agreed Magnus. “All of this,” he flicked his wrist at the amassed armies overhead as if banishing a nuisance, “might just be a smaller part of an even Greater Plan. A test, if you will.”

“You think God would test his loyal servants?” asked Maryse, coldly.

“Yes,” said Magnus and Alec at the same time.

The airbase was silent again. Clary helpfully provided another tumbleweed. It caught everyone’s attention, and they turned to look at her with bated breath. Well, none of them really needed to breathe, and though Alec and Magnus were in the habit of it, they hadn’t remembered to do so for a little while.

“I don’t think it matters what other people have written,” Clary said simply. “Not when it has to do with people, ‘cuz people never do what they’re told. You can always just cross it out or erase it and write something new.”

It was silent again -- the kind of silence that there might have been before Creation. Not even a tumbleweed rolled by.

In that moment, Magnus and Alec both understood something that neither Maryse or Asmodeus would ever be able to understand. It wasn’t that Clary would grow up to be Evil Incarnate, like her father before her, or that she would grow up to be Good Incarnate, like he might have been. Clary had been raised in a small town in New York, surrounded by beloved, human family and friends, sheltered and loved. She was a sweet girl, one who liked playing in the woods with her friends, and drawing comics for them to read, and all she had wanted for her birthday was to get a puppy. No matter how Clary grew up, she wouldn’t grow up to be Good Incarnate or Evil Incarnate, because she would be Human Incarnate.

Suddenly, it was as if something broke -- or, rather, lifted. The hosts above began to ripple and then disappear, vanishing once again to above and below. The dark clouds broke apart, wafting away and dispersing through the sky, and the mid-afternoon light broke through once again. A breeze swept over them, blowing Clary’s red hair back with it. She closed her eyes and smiled at the feeling of the summer wind on her face.

When she opened them again, the skies were clear and blue, not a single angel or demon to be found.

“I believe I must seek out further instructions,” said Maryse slowly. She shot Alec a final glare and disappeared in a beam of light, an ever-shifting storm of forms, and the roar of beating wings.

“I will do so as well,” said Asmodeus. He narrowed his cat-like eyes at Magnus.. “Below _will_ hear about your part in this. Good luck getting to Heaven before our Master knows you’re dead. And I haven’t a clue what your father will say, Clary Fray.”

“I don’t wanna know what Dad’s got to say either,” Clary agreed, “I’m supposed to be grounded.”

“Right.” And with that, Asmodeus disappeared in much the same fashion as Maryse.

And after that, Magnus and Alec were stuck doing something that they were even less equipped for than preventing the End of the World: talking to children.

All that was left was the two of them, Clary, and her friends, both of whom were wearing the looks of misery and desperation that Alec and Magnus could identify as hunger and boredom.

“So… that’s it?”

Magnus snorted. “For them? Maybe. For you and I? Certainly not. This time tomorrow, I’ll be drawn and quartered in Hell, and you’ll be… forced to watch the Sound of Music for all eternity, or something,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“I think you’ll be okay,” said Clary.

Before he could stop himself, Alec blurted, “Well, that’s reassuring.”

“I know all about you two,” said Clary, and she stepped forward and grabbed both of their hands in her own tiny ones. Neither of them disappeared, thankfully. “You don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll fix it for you.”

Magnus blinked. “Why, thank you, biscuit.”

“That’s not my name,” said Clary, but she smiled fondly. “But I like it. You two are going to be fine.”

She took each of their hands and pressed them together, then released them. She turned back to look at her friends. They were eyeing her warily, and she frowned. It was hard work for an eleven year old girl to save the world, but it was even harder when she didn’t have her friends to support her -- and Clary had scared them enough for one day.

“I think it would be better if not everyone remembered this,” said Clary. “I won’t make them forget, but… if maybe they didn’t really remember, that would be fine.” She stopped and thought about it for a moment, concentrating hard. “Yeah. It’ll almost be like this didn’t happen.

* * *

 

And then it was.

Clary’s two friends started, and looked around suspiciously.

“What’re we doing here? I thought we were going to Si’s for pizza?” asked the girl.

“Clary, your dad is gonna kill you when he finds out you left the house,” said the boy worriedly. “What just happened?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Clary, and she jumped back onto her bike.

“But who’re those guys? And why are they holding hands?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Clary repeated, smiling. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

The kids took off in one direction. Magnus and Alec took off in the other, retracing their steps back to the mottled frame of Magnus’ car.

“Can you still drive this thing?”

“Yes,” said Magnus tiredly, “if I do this.” He illustrated his point with a snap of his fingers, and the car was in one piece again, a vivid pink against the grey of the airbase. For once, Alec didn’t complain, just slid into the car.

Magnus started the car. Alec sniffed.

“Are you sure this thing is safe?”

Magnus laughed. “You never change, Alexander.”

“No, seriously, doesn’t it smell like something is burning to you?”

It was hot, and it wasn’t because of the car. It was like a dome of warmth had gone up around the airbase, dropping down and trapping everyone inside. The air was heavy and sticky, and smelled like burning flesh. Alec stared at Magnus, terror in his eyes. Magnus had gone white as a sheet.

“I thought it was over?”

There was a sound like an earthquake, or a volcano -- the sound of the earth splitting open, and the sound of futility.

“No,” said Magnus, and then he slammed his foot against the gas pedal. Nothing. He hit the steering wheel. “Damn it,” he cursed.

“What?”

“That isn’t Asmodeus. It’s _him_. It’s her Father.”

_“Fuck.”_

“You know I love it when you talk dirty, Alexander,” said Magnus and then, to the car, “Work, damn it!”

Alec glanced out the window. Across the blacktop, one of Clary’s friends smacked at the air with a stick, but it didn’t have much of an effect on the forcefield around her. A cloud of black smoke amassed toward the south, oozing with ichor. Alec’s gaze darted back toward the building of the airbase, where workers were beginning to trickle out of the building like ants in a stupor, wondering where the last two hours of their lives were gone. Horror washed over Alec.

“Magnus, there are humans here.”

“Thank you for sharing, Alexander.”

“We can’t just leave them.”

“ _Now_ you decide you like people?” asked Magnus. His grip tightened on the steering wheel, and then he released it. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “We’ve spent thousands of years ruining their lives, we might as well help them out for once.”

“I _was_ helping them.”

“Right, sure thing, angel,” said Magnus, and he exited the car.

Outside, the smoke had begun to coil dangerously up toward the sky, and seemed to saturate the inside of the domed forcefield. Clary’s friend had resorted to banging her entire bike against it.

When he rounded the corner of the car, Magnus came face to face with Alec. He looked beautiful, eyes burning with righteous fury in the late-afternoon light. His hair was a mess, as always, but the suit had held up remarkably well. Magnus’ words died in his throat.

Alec opened his mouth, then closed it. Magnus gave an awkward laugh, and took a step closer. No matter what was happening around them, they always seemed to end up here. It really did feel like the world was ending around them.

“Magnus,” said Alec. He hesitated, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, and then he gently smoothed them over the lapels of Magnus’ jacket. Magnus instantly brought his hands up to cup Alec’s elbows.

“Alexander.”

“I just,” Alec said, and he licked his lips. His gaze flicked up to the sky, and then back down to meet Magnus’. “Look, I don’t know -- no matter what happens here, I want you to know that deep down, I've always known there was a spark of goodness in you.” Softly, he pressed his fingers deeper into the fabric of Magnus’ suit jacket, splaying the fingers of his right hand against Magnus' chest. “You have an amazing heart, Magnus.”

“You really are trying to get me fired, aren't you?” teased Magnus, voice gentle. He rubbed soothing circles over the back of Alec's arms with his thumbs.

“No,” said Alec bluntly, “you're already pretty bad at your job. You don't need me for that.”

Magnus tossed his head back and laughed. “That's probably true. Alexander?”

“Yeah?”

“Deep down, I've always known you could be a bit of an asshole.” He shrugged, smiling fondly. “I like that about you.”

Alec rolled his eyes, but it was accompanied by a small smile. In the background, an eleven year old boy was throwing himself futilely against the immovable wall of the forcefield, and the black smoke was thick enough to cut with a knife. Alec couldn't take his eyes off Magnus.

“So,” Alec said as nonchalantly as he could,  “that last request, huh?”

Magnus let out a breath. Ash had begun to rain down around them. “What about it?”

“Was it something like this?” asked Alec, and he hauled Magnus in by the lapels of his jacket, pressing their lips together in a kiss.

Alec had never kissed anyone before in his life. Magnus had kissed thousands of people. It was the best kiss either of them had ever had. Alec slid his hand up to cup Magnus’ face, deepening the kiss. Magnus’ hands were gentle at his side, a sharp contrast to the heat of the kiss, and Alec wanted to soak the moment in forever. He felt himself involuntarily smiling against Magnus’ lips.

While not needing to breathe had many benefits, such as an affinity for deep-sea diving and the ability to completely baffle a police officer with a breathalyzer, the best of them all was the ability to, quite literally, make out forever. Now that he had started, Alec didn’t really want to stop. He could feel the drum of Magnus’ heartbeat still under his hand, the warmth of Magnus’ skin, the soft press of lips against his own. He could have spent years, even _centuries_ doing this

Magnus pulled his head back first, and Alec chased after him almost in a daze, planting another hungry kiss on the demon’s mouth. Magnus laughed, gently bracketing Alec’s face with his hands to hold him in place, and tilted his head back.

“Alec,” he said, quietly, eyes darting back down to Alec’s wet lips for a moment, “there are humans here.”

“So? I’m sure they’ve seen two people kiss before.”

Another laugh bubbled out of Magnus’ throat, and he stroked softly at Alec’s cheek with his thumb. “I don’t think they’ve seen the Great Adversary himself, though.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.”

“That.”

“Yes, Alexander. That.” Magnus smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in his eyes as they flicked toward the approaching cloud of black smoke and then back to Alec.

Alec cupped Magnus’ hand in his own. He focused on the warmth of Magnus’ palm on his cheek, soaking in the feeling for a minute, before sliding his hands up over Magnus’ shoulders, pulling him in again -- not for a kiss, but for an embrace. Magnus stiffened in surprise for a moment, then slipped his hands around Alec’s waist to rest on his back, pulling him in closer.

They stood like that for a moment, until, finally, Magnus said, “We’re probably going to die if you don’t release me, Alexander.”

“We’re probably going to die anyway,” muttered Alec, but he did as he was told. He watched as Magnus rounded the car, popping the trunk open and sifting around until he finally emerged, victorious, with what looked like a crowbar. Alec raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to fight the Devil himself with a _crowbar_?”

“I’m sorry,” said Magnus patiently, “do you have anything better?”

Alec peered around. He scooped up the sword that had fallen with War’s disappearance. Alec gave the sword an experimental wave. The length of the blade burst into flame, and he smirked.

“That’s hot,” said Magnus.

Alec’s smirk didn’t fall. Well, not for another few seconds, when he accidentally shifted his grip on the blade and burnt his hand. It had been six thousand years, after all.

The two caught each other’s eyes for a moment, and a current of understanding coursed between them. After thousands of years, there wasn’t much to say to each other -- or, rather, there was too much to say. There was no language on earth, none in time and space, no words that could describe what the last few thousand years together had meant to Magnus and Alec, or how they felt about each other. Their bond was, for lack of a better word, ineffable.

The two of them went side by side into the fray, shoulders brushing with each movement. Plumes of twister-like smoke poured into the sky, and the crowd of workers that had amassed at the airbase began to tremble. Clary’s friends had given up on trying to get out of the shimmering barrier, and one of them was now attempting to study the bent handlebars of her bike. The other was staring in horror, wide eyed, at the approaching mass of smoke. Alec and Magnus steeled themselves as it approached.

_Clary looked around. She took in the people at her back, her friends at her side, the angel and the demon standing before her, and then looked to the tendrils of black smoke, a mask of innocence slipping over her face._

_Conflict swirled inside her, something inside her longing for the familiar figure as it approached, but Clary stood her ground._

_She approached the figure as it neared, one hand raised, light emanating from her small form._

And something shifted in the world -- something small and subtle, something nearly undetectable. A quick wave of change that cleansed the earth. Magnus and Alec looked up slowly.

Where the tornado of black smoke had been approaching, there was now a car. It wasn’t a fancy car -- it was nothing like Magnus’ own half-totaled Ferrari, and it lacked the presence or personality of any of the Four Horsemen’s bikes. It was more of a minivan, in fact, than a car -- it was the kind of battered vehicle that had been in the family for years, accumulating various stains and injuries from years of abuse by soccer teams. It was the kind of car that ferried kids to and from birthday parties, field trips, and sporting activities. It was decidedly not the kind of car Satan himself would be driving, assuming he drove (which he didn’t -- most of his transportation involved a chariot drawn by the souls of the damned, impractical as it was).

The car door opened, and out stepped Luke Garroway. He was well-dressed and serious-looking, the epitome of a Reasonable Adult. His eyes paused briefly when they landed on Alec and Magnus (Alec awkwardly tried to hide the flaming sword behind his back; his only father was the Lord Himself, but Luke brimmed with the kind of paternal energy that made Alec want to not disappoint him -- and then maybe go play a game of catch), but quickly flew to Clary and her little group there.

“Clarissa Adele,” he called. “What on earth is going on here?”

That was apparently Clary’s cue. She made a rushing motion with her hand, and then her friends hopped on their bikes and tore off (even the one with the mutilated handlebars) toward the woods behind the airbase. They took off down the dirt road with practiced ease. Air base workers drifted back toward the building, at a loss for what had happened. A sense of normalcy rained down over the base.

“Clary! Clary!”

“Hi Dad, love you!” shouted Clary over her shoulder, but she didn’t bother to slow down, instead speeding off until she and her friends were just three laughing dots.

“That girl,” Luke sighed. He swung the ring of keys around his finger.  “Clarissa, what on Earth are you up to?”

Alec and Magnus looked at one another, and shrugged. Better Earth than Heaven or Hell, after all.

“So,” said Magnus, for lack of a better thing to say. “Taki’s?”

**Sunday**

**(Or, Another Beginning)**

It was Sunday, the beginning after the end, or the beginning of a new beginning. Central Park was swarmed with people -- families getting out of church, joggers making their eternal, unchanging routes through the paths, a gaggle of Law and Order extras smoking between filming takes. And amidst it all were Alec and Magnus, cups of coffee in their hands, weaving in and out of the chaos of humanity just as they had on countless Sundays before.

“It’s like nothing has changed,” Alec was saying, drumming his fingers against the paper cup. “My apartment looks completely untouched. Not a thing out of place, it’s just like it was before all of… this.”

“That’s a shame,” said Magnus. “I truly was looking forward to the destruction of that eyesore you call a building. I was going to knock it down myself. You’re sure nothing has changed?”

Alec rolled his eyes, and affectionately butted Magnus in the side with his elbow. “There are a few extra paintings in my apartment. She’s pretty good, you know, even though she’s only eleven.”

“One day, you could be selling them for a fortune,” agreed Magnus.

“And your place?”

“It’s fine,” said Magnus. “She even got the sludge out of the carpet, which was all I could possibly ask and more.”

“Huh,” said Alec. The two of them lapsed into silence, watching the near mechanical workings of humanity around them, people going about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. Technically, nothing had happened. A few feet away, a little girl tripped over her shoelace and went crashing to the ground. Her eyes welled up with tears, but she didn’t cry. Her scraped knee was suddenly smooth again, not a trace of blood to be seen.

“Nice save,” commented Magnus.

“Thanks,” said Alec, watching as the little girl happily (if a little dazedly) stood up and ran to her mother. “Have you heard from your people?”

“Not a word. And you?”

“Nothing,” Alec said, drumming his fingers on his coffee cup. “I think they’re pretending it didn’t happen.”

Magnus snorted. “Bureaucracy.”

“At least it’s over now.”

“Hopefully,” said Magnus as the two drifted further into the park, passing a Yoga class stretching on the lawn, then a young couple feeding each other grapes on a blanket. “It’s all plans within plans, so who can tell.”

“You think so?” asked Alec cautiously. “That… there could be more?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Alec as they crossed a bridge. “I try to think about it, and nothing makes sense. It’s all just -- it didn’t have to happen like that. How could He make a mistake? Do you have any bread?”

“Bread is bad for them,” said Magnus offhandedly, and he summoned a bag of birdseed. They stopped in the middle of the bridge spent a few moments silently scattering birdseed down to the ravenous ducks below. Magnus was tempted to make them fight for it as usual, then thought the better of it. He probably wouldn’t have to worry about tipping the cosmic scales for a while, now. Might as well enjoy life while he could, he thought, studying Alec’s handsome profile.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Magnus, softly. And then, “Do you think it was a mistake?”

“It can’t be. Can it? He doesn’t make mistakes. It would have to be part of a Greater Plan. The Rebellion, the Garden of Eden, now this -- none of it went right, but it couldn’t have gone wrong. I almost wonder if it’s like -- like, a cosmic game of chess. If he’s just testing everything to see if he made it right.” Alec looked over at Magnus, an eyebrow arched. “Do you… do you think He would do that?”

“Maybe,” Magnus said, humming. “But that’s not what I was talking about.”

Alec studied Magnus’ face, brow furrowed in confusion. Realization hit him like a lightning bolt; his face flushed a handsome shade of pink, and his eyes went wide. He didn’t quite seem to know what to do with his mouth, other than stutter. It was cute, cute enough to make Magnus smile even as he braced himself for an answer he wasn’t quite sure he wanted.

“I -- I, uh -- Magnus, I --” Alec started, shifting closer toward Magnus. He closed his eyes for a moment, swallowing, and reached a tentative hand to rest on Magnus’ shoulder, tilting him closer. When his eyes opened, they were burning intensely -- not with the righteous fervor of an angel, but with something gentle, yet ardent.

Alec locked eyes with Magnus, and said, softly but firmly, “No, Magnus. It wasn’t a mistake.” And then he leaned forward, pressing his lips gently to Magnus’.  The kiss was quick and tender, the opposite of their first one, but it sent warmth flooding Magnus right down to his toes. He found himself chasing Alec’s lips when he pulled away. “And that wasn’t either,” added Alec quickly, a lopsided grin on his face. He took Magnus’ hand in his.

Magnus sighed and looked down at their intertwined hands, then back up to where Alec’s eyes were gleaming with a tentative happiness in the morning sun. “You’re not worried about falling?”

“No,” said Alec with certainty. He rubbed soothing circles over the back of Magnus’ hand with his thumb. “I think there are bigger things for them to worry about Up There, and anyway,” Alec darted his gaze down, almost shyly, then back up, “I don’t care about that. I care about you. I couldn’t have spent the last six thousand years without you, and I don’t want to spend the next six thousand years without you either. If… if that’s what you want.”

“Oh, Alexander,” said Magnus. “You’re always surprising me.”

“In good ways?”

“In the best ways,” said Magnus. He leaned forward onto the bridge, sighing. "I guess we're off the hook for the time being. Any idea how you'd like to spend our little vacation?"

Alec caught Magnus' eye. He regarded Magnus with a hot stare that, for once, left Magnus as the one with a light blush fanning across his face.

"We could always go to your place," Alec said nonchalantly. "For a cup of coffee." 

Magnus lifted an eyebrow at that, and then burst out laughing. Alec couldn't help darting forward and kissing him again. 

"Yes," said Magnus, still laughing against Alec's lips. "I think that's a wonderful idea." 

The two stood there for a while, though, leaning against each other and raining bird seed down onto the lake below. Hands still twined together, they laughed quietly in the serenity of the park, happy just to be together. 

There was no need to rush -- they had all the time in the world, after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who made it this far! It was a long ride, I know. 
> 
> Please let me know what you thought! Feedback really means a lot. Did it make you laugh? Make you cry? Make you angry? (I hope not on that last one.) I would absolutely love to hear what you thought, and what your favorite parts were, so please don't hesitate to say something.
> 
> At the moment, I consider this wrapped up, but let me know what you think. I have a couple thoughts dancing around in my head for short one shots and drabbles based on Alec and Magnus' earlier exploits, or even that... cup of coffee... If people want more, I'll happly write more! 
> 
> As always, please hit me up on tumblr at [magicmagnus!](http://magicmagnus.tumblr.com) That's where you can get headcanons and tidbits, and see what I'm working on next, or subscribe on here. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
